Tailoring active color rendering and multiband photodetection in a vanadium-dioxide-based metamaterial absorber

Metamaterials have demonstrated exotic electromagnetic properties, which offer a good platform for realizing light absorption, photodetection, filtering, and so on. However, broadband multifunctional metamaterial absorbers are restricted in cascaded structures. Here, broadband multifunctional properties were realized by introducing vanadium dioxide into a metamaterial absorber. Through the modified design and highly efficient utilization of multiple resonant modes, both plasmonic tunable color filters and near-infrared photodetectors can be simultaneously achieved by this construction. Meanwhile, active color and a photodetection band in the near-infrared range can become tunable with the insulating–metallic transition of vanadium dioxide. Thus, the variations of rendering colors could correspondingly indicate shifts of the near-infrared photodetection bands. This method theoretically confirms the feasibility of designing multifunctional devices via a vanadium-dioxide-based metamaterial absorber, which holds great promise for future versatile utilization of multiple physical mechanisms to achieve numerous functionalities in a simple nanostructure or device.