Designing flexible and versatile metamaterial absorbers

Absorbers play an important role in protecting sensitive electronic devices from electromagnetic interference by absorbing the energy of incoming waves and reducing unnecessary reflection or transmission. In this paper we introduce new types of absorbers based on periodic structures, or the so-called metamaterials, which give us additional degrees of freedom to design the absorbing performance of absorbers with reduced thicknesses. Specifically, we demonstrate two types of metamaterial absorbers: one allowing us to customize absorption and other scattering parameters at selected frequencies; another absorbing only high-power microwaves and transmitting small signals even at the same frequency to maintain wireless communications. These metamaterial absorbers are expected to facilitate solving modern, complex EM interference issues where different-interdependent requirements exist.