Strong Light-Matter Interaction in Lithography-Free Planar Metamaterial Perfect Absorbers

The efficient harvesting of electromagnetic (EM) waves by subwavelength nanostructures can result in perfect light absorption in the narrow or broad frequency range. These metamaterial-based perfect light absorbers are of particular interest in many applications, including thermal photovoltaics, photovoltaics, sensing, filtering, and photo-detection applications. Although advances in nanofabrication have provided the opportunity to observe strong light-matter interaction in various optical nanostructures, the repeatability and upscaling of these nano units have remained a challenge for their use in large scale applications. Thus, in recent years, the concept of lithography-free planar light perfect absorbers has attracted much attention in different parts of the EM spectrum, owing to their ease of fabrication and high functionality. This Perspective explores the material and architecture requirements for the realization of light perfect absorption using these multilayer metamaterial designs from ultraviolet (UV) to far-infrared (FIR) wavelength regimes. We provide a general theoretical formulation to find the ideal condition for achieving near unity light absorption. Later, these theoretical estimations are coupled with findings of recent studies on perfect light absorbers to explore the physical phenomena and the limits of different materials and design architectures. These studies are categorized in three main class of materials; metals, semiconductors, and other types of materials. We show that, by the use of proper material and design configuration, it is possible to realize these lithography-free light perfect absorbers in every portion of the EM spectrum. This, in turn, opens up the opportunity of the practical application of these perfect absorbers in large scale dimensions. In the last section, we discuss the progress, challenges, and outlook of this field to outline its future direction.