Thermally tunable water-substrate broadband metamaterial absorbers

The naturally occurring water has frequency dispersive permittivity at microwave frequencies and thus is a promising constituent material for broadband absorbers. Here, we develop water as the dielectric spacer in the substrate of metal-backed metamaterial (MM) absorbers. The designed substrate is a hybrid of water and a low-permittivity dielectric material. Such a design allows tight packaging of water and easy fabrication of the absorber. We obtain broadband absorption at temperatures of interest by designing the hybrid substrate and MM inclusions. Additionally, the absorption performance of the water-substrate MM absorbers could be tunable according to the environment temperature. We experimentally demonstrate the broadband and thermally tunable absorption performance. We expect that water could replace dielectric layers in other structural MM absorbers to achieve the broadband and thermally tunable absorption performance.