Black phosphorus-based anisotropic absorption structure in the mid-infrared

Black phosphorus (BP), an emerging two-dimensional (2D) material with intriguing optical properties, forms a promising building block in optical and photonic devices. In this work, we propose a simple structure composed of a monolayer BP sandwiched by polymer and dielectric materials with low index contrast, and numerically demonstrate the perfect absorption mechanism via the critical coupling of guided resonances in the mid-infrared. Due to the inherent in-plane anisotropic feature of BP, the proposed structure exhibits highly polarization-dependent absorption characteristics, i.e., the optical absorption of the structure reaches 99.9% for TM polarization and only 3.2% for TE polarization at the same wavelength. Furthermore, the absorption peak and resonance wavelength can be flexibly tuned by adjusting the electron doping of BP, the geometrical parameters of the structure and the incident angles of light. Finally, the perfect absorption is also realized with the multilayer BP by simply adjusting the geometrical parameters. With high efficiency absorption, the remarkable anisotropy, flexible tunability, and easy-to-fabricate advantages, the proposed structure shows promising prospects in the design of polarization-selective and tunable high-performance devices in the mid-infrared, such as polarizers, modulators and photodetectors. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement.