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.