Bandwidth enhancement in disordered metamaterial absorbers

In this letter, we show numerically and experimentally that a positional disorder of a collection of absorbing electromagnetic wave resonators operating in the long wavelength regime dramatically enhances the absorption bandwidth. The demonstration is performed by using single-size ring-shaped thin metal pieces periodically or randomly positioned onto a back-grounded dielectric layer. For periodic array, an optimum in the periodicity is pointed out with a narrow bandwidth, while the increasing influence of coupling effects for resonators in close vicinity explains a three-fold bandwidth enhancement in the case of positional disorder. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.