Design and characterization of a dual-band perfect metamaterial absorber for solar cell applications

• New and dual-band metamaterial absorber for solar cells.
• Geometrically simple and easy to fabricate metamaterial absorber.
• Wide range of visible range scavenging applications.
• Efficient harvesting for the novel photonic materials and innovative photonic devices.

This paper proposes a metamaterial absorber design for solar energy harvesting using a simplified and symmetric structure. A unit cell of this design consists of three important layers namely, the bottom metallic layer, which is gold lossy, the intermediate layer: made of a lossy dielectric material that is gallium arsenide and patches which formed by a combination of gold and gallium arsenide. These three important layers are being carefully arranged at the top of a dielectric spacer. The geometric structure was being examined for its contribution towards absorption characteristics. The simulation results show outstanding dual-bands absorption (99.96% and 99.37%) in the visible frequency regime of electromagnetic wave. Due to the excellent symmetric nature of the proposed structure, its absorptance capacity exhibits polarization insensitivity for a wide range of incident angles for electromagnetic radiation.