Near Zero Index Perfect Metasurface Absorber using Inverted Conformal Mapping

The geometry of the characteristic element forming the artificial structure of an electromagnetic metamaterial defines the way the metamaterial will interact with electromagnetic waves, and accordingly, how it will transmit, reflect, and absorb electromagnetic energy. Metamaterials have been discovered that can manipulate electromagnetic waves to create perfect absorption of incident electromagnetic energy using relatively simple elemental geometries. But the phenomenon is confined to very narrow frequency bandwidths owing to the mono-resonance characteristics of simple cellular structures. Complex cellular geometries based on the combination of many different fundamental building blocks may be able to constructively couple many more resonances and broaden the perfect absorption bandwidth. We describe here a metasurface based upon geometric inversion of a set of conformal mapping contours. The resulting geometry forms a nearly continuous series of perfect absorption resonances within an ultrathin (lambda/165) metasurface to develop broadband absorption in a frequency range of interest for downhole chemical spectroscopy. The metasurface is derived from a geometric inversion of the Rhodonea, or more commonly called four-leaf roses, conformal mapping contours and was found to exhibit a near zero index metamaterial (NZIM) behavior. An uncooled microbolometer design is described that uses the metasurface geometry on a single VO2 thermometric substrate leading to an infrared detector with predicted maximum absorption of 99.94% at 4.3 mu m and an absorption bandwidth of 170% FWHM on 15.8 mu m center wavelength, coincident with important chemical spectra of downhole hydrocarbons. The infrared detector design has a predicted maximum detectivity D*=1.5x10(9)cm z/W and noise equivalent difference temperature NEDT of 70mK at a frame rate of 60Hz. These levels of detector performance conventionally would be achievable only with cryogenically cooled technologies and could represent a significant step in the effort towards deploying an in situ infrared chemical spectroscopy sensor into downhole logging applications.