Design, fabrication and characterization of resonant metamaterial filters for infrared multispectral imaging

• A theoretical and experimental study of resonant transmission of aperture arrays
• Transmission filters in the infrared range are developed for multispectral imaging.
• Impact of fabrication defaults, rounded corners, and aperture anisotropy is analyzed.
• The simulations of realistic structures increase agreement measurement/simulation.

We present the design of infrared filters for multispectral imaging applications, based on square annular aperture arrays in a thin gold film. These structures function as band pass filters with large bandwidth and high transmission at resonance. A modal analysis based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) is performed to obtain quickly the features of this resonance. The center wavelength can be tuned in the 7–12 μm range while keeping constant the quality factor and maximum transmission by scaling all transverse dimensions of the apertures, which allows to obtain filters with different centering on the same substrate in a single fabrication step. Large area samples have been fabricated on a silicon wafer by electronic lithography. Spectrophotometric measurements are in rather good agreement with numerical predictions. In addition, angle resolved measurements show that the filters are quite tolerant to the incidence angle up to 30° for both polarizations which is consistent with our FEM simulations. Finally, a complete sensitivity analysis allows us to evaluate acceptable opto-geometric tolerances of fabrication and thus to improve reproducibility on large areas. The impact of fabrication defaults (rounded corners, aperture anisotropy, aperture edge roughness, sloping aperture edges) on the filtering performances is analyzed. The simulations of realistic structures allow to explain and reduce the differences between measured and simulated spectra.