A polarization-/angle-insensitive, bandwidth-optimized, metamaterial absorber in the microwave regime

An enhanced metamaterial absorber based on the circumscribed-cross resonator is introduced in this paper. The new structure is polarization-independent, due to the symmetry of its unit cell, and is proven efficient for the attenuation of obliquely incident waves. The absorption mechanism is thoroughly investigated and is found to be mainly related to the losses of the dielectric substrate. Furthermore, by exploiting the scalability property of metamaterials, the operational bandwidth of our design can be drastically improved by placing unit cells with properly scaled resonators adjacent to each other. In this context, various combinations of three, four, and nine unit cells that can increase the full width at half maximum up to as much as 11.18 %, are developed. The overall performance of the proposed configurations is deemed promising for the realization of microwave metamaterial absorbers for several practical applications.