A novel wideband optical absorber based on all-metal 2D gradient nanostructures

Recently, all-metal nanostructures for perfect absorption of light have attracted much attention due to their excellent plasmonic and photonic properties, but only narrow absorption bands were obtained in previous studies. In this paper, a new kind of metallic metasurface with wideband absorption of visible light is designed, which consists only of a gold nanotriangle array on the opaque metal substrate. By combining different resonant modes in the gradual-changed triangular nanostructure, the wide absorption waveband in visible region from 378 to 626 nm is achieved with more than 90% absorptivity. We demonstrate that the absorption property of the nanostructure can be controlled by tuning the cell size and incident angle. In addition, a metallic trapezoidal grating structure is proposed which can also realize wideband light absorption. This research provides a novel strategy in designing wideband metamaterial absorbers for visible light based on all-metal nanostructures which have great potential applications in light energy harvesting and photoelectric conversion.