Observation of reflectionless absorption due to spatial Kramers–Kronig profile

• Published in: Nature communications 2017-07, Vol.8 (1), p.51-10, Article 51
• Main Authors: Ye, Dexin, Cao, Cheng, Zhou, Tianyi, Huangfu, Jiangtao, Zheng, Guoan, Ran, Lixin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/624/1075/1081; 639/624/399/1015; Absorption; Electric fields; Humanities and Social Sciences; Incidence angle; multidisciplinary; Permittivity; Propagation; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00123-4

As a fundamental phenomenon in electromagnetics and optics, material absorption has been extensively investigated for centuries. However, omnidirectional, reflectionless absorption in inhomogeneous media has yet to be observed. Previous research on transformation optics indicated that such absorption cannot easily be implemented without involving gain media. A recent theory on wave propagation, however, implies the feasibility to implement such absorption requiring no gain, provided that the permittivity profile of this medium can satisfy the spatial Kramers–Kronig relations. In this work, we implement such a profile over a broad frequency band based on a novel idea of space–frequency Lorentz dispersion. A wideband, omnidirectionally reflectionless absorption is then experimentally observed in the gigahertz range, and is in good agreement with theoretical analysis and full-wave simulations. The proposed method based on the space–frequency dispersion implies the practicability to construct gain-free omnidirectionally non-reflecting absorbers. Reflectionless absorption independent of the angle of incidence usually requires the introduction of gain media into the system. Here, Ye et al. implement a recent theoretical proposal to achieve this with a spatially varying permittivity, showing that this approach is experimentally feasible.