Design and fabrication of a metamaterial absorber in the microwave range

Artificially engineered metamaterials have enabled the creation of electromagnetic materials with properties not found in nature. We present the design, fabrication, and characterization of a metamaterial absorber which is resonant at microwave frequencies, which shows a wide-band polarization-insensitive and wide-angle strong absorption. 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 calculated results were compared with experimental data and the results show that they are in good agreement. Furthermore, by exploiting the scalability property of metamaterials, the operational bandwidth of the design can be drastically improved by placing unit cells with properly scaled resonators adjacent to each other. In this context, various combinations of four and nine unit cells that can increase the full width at half maximum up to as much as 12.1% are developed. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:1748–1752, 2014