Ultra-broadband and tunable saline water-based absorber in microwave regime

We present a saline water-based absorber that can offer an extremely wide bandwidth of electromagnetic absorption in the microwave frequency regime. The designed absorber is a hybrid of saline water and Poly Tetra Fluoro Ethylene (PTFE) dielectric material, which exhibits an absorption level greater than 90% across the frequency band from 1.4 to 3.3 and 4.3 to 63 GHz, with a relative absorption bandwidth as high as 180%. Meanwhile, the sensitivity of the absorption against oblique incidence is studied for both TE and TM polarizations. Additionally, the absorption performance of this saline water-based absorber could be tunable by changing the salinity and the combination of different temperatures and salinity. To explain the mechanism, interference theory is employed to investigate the designed absorber, and the theoretically calculated results are well in agreement with the simulation. This design offers an effective and feasible way to construct tunable and ultra-broadband absorber in low-cost stealth technology. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement.