We propose and numerically investigate a novel ultra-broadband solar absorber by applying iron in a 2D simple metamaterial structure. The proposed structure can achieve the perfect absorption above 95% covering the wavelength range from 400 to 1500 nm. The average absorption reaches 97.8% over this wavelength range. The broadband perfect absorption is caused by the excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance and propagating surface plasmon resonance. We first propose and demonstrate that the iron is obviously beneficial to achieve impedance matching between the metamaterial structure and the free space over an ultra-broad frequency band in the visible and near-infrared region, which play an extremely important role to generate an ultra-broadband perfect absorption. In order to further broaden the absorption band, we also demonstrate the perfect absorption exceeding 92% for the 400–2000 nm range by adding the number of metal-dielectric pairs and using both gold and iron simultaneously in the proposed structure. The average absorption of the improved absorber reaches 96.4% over the range of 400–2000 nm. The metamaterial absorbers using iron are very promising for many applications, which can greatly broaden the perfect absorption band in the solar spectrum and, meanwhile, can enormously reduce the cost in the actual production.

We propose and numerically investigate a perfect ultra-narrowband absorber with an absorption bandwidth of only 1.82 nm and an absorption efficiency exceeding 95% in the visible region. We demonstrate that the perfect ultra-narrowband absorption is ascribed to the coupling effect induced by localized surface plasmon resonance. The influence of structural dimensions on the optical performance is also investigated, and the optimal structure is obtained with the extremely low reflectivity (0.001) of the resonance dip. The perfect absorber can be operated as a refractive index sensor with a sensitivity of around 425 nm/RIU and the figure of merit (FOM) reaching 233.5, which greatly improves the accuracy of the plasmonic sensors in visible region. Moreover, the corresponding figure of merit (FOM*) for this sensor is also calculated to describe the performance of the intensity change detection at a fixed frequency, which can be up to 1.4 × 105. Due to the high sensing performance, the metamaterial structure has great potential in the biological binding, integrated photodetectors, chemical applications and so on.

A near-infrared plasmonic refractive index (RI) sensor with figure of merit (FOM) as high as 124.6 is proposed and investigated numerically. The RI sensing is realized by employing the linear relation between resonant wavelength and RI of the material under detecting. Based on the fillet cavity coupled with two metal-insulator-metal waveguides, transmission efficiency (T) and optical resolution (FWHM) of the RI sensor are both improved to a great extent with T = 95% and FWHM = 12nm, keeping acceptable wavelength sensitivity of 1496nm/RIU within the near-infrared region. In addition, a sensitivity as high as 3476nm/RIU is obtained by optimizing the shape and size of fillet cavity. In general, the high FOM, transmittance and sensitivity achieved by our design may get further applications in biomedical science and nanophotonic circuits.

We propose and numerically investigate a novel perfect ultra-narrow band absorber based on a metal-dielectric-metal-dielectric-metal periodic structure working at near-infrared region, which consists of a dielectric layer sandwiched by a metallic nanobar array and a thin gold film over a dielectric layer supported by a metallic film. The absorption efficiency and ultra-narrow band of the absorber are about 98 % and 0.5 nm, respectively. The high absorption is contributed to localized surface plasmon resonance, which can be influenced by the structure parameters and the refractive index of dielectric layer. Importantly, the ultra-narrow band absorber shows an excellent sensing performance with a high sensitivity of 2400 nm/RIU and an ultra-high figure of merit of 4800. The FOM of refractive index sensor is significantly improved, compared with any previously reported plasmonic sensor. The influences of structure parameters on the sensing performance are also investigated, which will have a great guiding role to design high-performance refractive index sensors. The designed structure has huge potential in sensing application.