Angle- and Polarization-Insensitive Metamaterial Absorber using Via Array

In this paper, we propose an angle- and polarization-insensitive metamaterial absorber. We design a metamaterial unit cell that is based on a split ring cross resonator (SRCR). We observe that the absorption frequency and absorption ratio are insensitive to incident angles when a via array surrounds the SRR. We demonstrate the effect of the via array using full-wave simulations by comparing the absorptivity of the SRCR with and without the via array. Because of the symmetric geometry, we also realize polarization insensitivity. We build the proposed absorber on a printed-circuit-board with 30 × 30 unit cells, and we demonstrate its performance experimentally in free space. Under normal incidence, the fabricated absorber shows 99.6% absorptivity at 11.3 GHz for all polarization angles, while for oblique incidence, the fabricated absorber maintains an absorptivity higher than 90% for incident angles up to 70° and 60° for transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) modes, respectively.