In this paper, an all-metal nanostructure is designed with a large frequency ratio ($\sim 6$) and a large bandwidth ratio ($\sim 32$), and consists of period slit-box cavities and nanodisk clusters. It is a nearly perfect absorber at 1.064 μm to achieve laser stealth, a frequency-selective emitter with low emissivity in wavelength ranges 3–5 and 8–14 μm to achieve infrared stealth, and also an emitter with near unity emissivity at 2.709 μm and 6.107 μm to compensate for the decrease of radiation heat transfer owing to the low emissivity. The absorption/emission peaks are all the Lorentzian shape, and the bandwidths, defined as full width at half-maximum, are 35, 408, and 1124 nm at 1.064, 2.709, and 6.107 μm, respectively. The electric and magnetic field distribution shows that the slit behaves like a capacitor, the box behaves like an inductance, and the nanodisk clusters can excite electric dipole resonance. Considering the solar irradiation, the nanostructure maintains middle-wavelength infrared signal reduction rates greater than 80% from 450 to 1000 K, and long-wavelength infrared signal reduction rates greater than 90% from room temperature to 1000 K. The laser and infrared stealth performances of our nanostructure at 473 K are also studied with different incident angles and polarization angles.

Multiband metamaterial perfect absorbers (MPAs) have promising applications in many fields like microbolometers, infrared detection, biosensing, and thermal emitters. In general, the single resonator can only excite a fundamental mode and achieve single absorption band. The multiband MPA can be achieved by combining several different sized resonators together. However, it’s still challenging to design the MPA with absorption bands of more than four and average absorptivity of more than 90% due to the interaction between differently sized resonators. In this paper, three absorption bands are successfully achieved with average absorptivity up to 98.5% only utilizing single one our designed ring-strip resonator, which can simultaneously excite a fundamental electric dipole mode, a higher-order electric quadrupole mode, and a higher-order electric octopole mode. As the biosensor, the sensing performance of the higher-order modes is higher than the fundamental modes. Then we try to increase the absorption bands by combining different sized ring-strip resonators together and make the average absorptivity above 90% by optimizing the geometry parameters. A six-band MPA is achieved by combining two different sized ring-strip resonators with average absorptivity up to 98.8%, which can excite two dipole modes, two quadrupole modes, and two octopole modes. A twelve-band MPA is achieved by combining four different sized ring-strip resonators with average absorptivity up to 93.7%, which can excite four dipole modes, four quadrupole modes, and four octopole modes.