Harnessing the electromagnetic absorptions of metamaterials for positive applications

Absorption or loss is inevitable for the metal-based metamaterials (MMs) due to the intrinsic loss of the metal, and constitutes a major hurdle to the practical realization of most applications such as a sub-wavelength lens. Thus, to reduce the losses becomes one of the major challenges in the MM field. However, the inevitable loss can also be harnessed to take a positive role in the applications of MMs such as stealth technology or other types of cloaking devices. In this presentation, after a brief review of the advances in MMs-based absorbers, we present several schemes to fulfill the desired electromagnetic absorption properties, both linear and nonlinear. For linear absorption, we have experimentally demonstrated that the absorption performance of an ordinary microwave absorbing material can be evidently improved by using the electric resonance resulting from an array of subwavelength metallic circuit elements. For nonlinear absorption, we show theoretically that the active linear magnetic permeability induces a nonlinear absorption, similar to the two-photon absorption (TPA), of electric field in a lossy MM with a Kerr-type nonlinear polarization.