Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer

Manuscript Draft

Manuscript Number: JQSRT-D-10-00143

Title: Narrow-band spectral features of structured silver surface with rectangular resonant cavities

Article Type: Full Length Article

Keywords: rectangular cavity；spectral absorptance；narrow-band thermal emitter

*Manuscript

Narrow-band spectral features of structured silver surface with

rectangular resonant cavities

Jinguo Huang, Yimin Xuan*, Qiang Li

School of Power Engineering, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

Abstract: This paper is aimed to investigate spectral properties of structured silver

surface with rectangular hollow cavities. Numerical computation is conducted to obtain

spectral distribution of surface absorptance with different structural parameters by

means of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. By means of numerical

examples, the effects of structural parameters as well as incident angle and azimuthal

angle on the spectral features of the structured surface are discussed. The directional

dependence of spectral absorptance is also analyzed. It is found that the structured

surface shows the characteristics of the peak absorption in the vicinity of resonant

wavelength of rectangular cavity. For some specific structure parameters, the peak

absorptance of the incident plane wave can reach as high as above 80% due to the

microcavity effect being excited. The optimal narrow-band absorption can be achieved

by the rational design of the structural parameters of rectangular cavity. The results

further show that the micron sized rectangular cavities fabricated on the low-emissivity

silver surface are very efficient for selective improvement of the radiative features,

which provides guidance for the narrow-band infrared thermal emitters design.

Keywords: rectangular cavity；spectral absorptance；narrow-band thermal emitter

*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 025 84315700; fax: +86 025 84315991
E-mail address: ymxuan@mail.njust.edu.cn

1
Nomenclature

a lattice period, μm

B magnetic flux density, Wb m-2

c speed of light, 2.998 108 m s-1

c1 first radiation constant, 3.742 1016 W m2

c2 second radiation constant, 1.4388 102 m K

D electric flux density, C m-2

da depth of square aperture, μm

d in depth of internal rectangular cavity, μm

d out thickness of structured surface, μm

dp the skin depth, nm

E electric field, V m-1

Eb spectral radiation power of blackbody, W m-3

H magnetic field, A m-1

lx length of rectangular cavity in x-direction, μm

ly length of rectangular cavity in y-direction, μm

lz length of rectangular cavity in z-direction, μm

m non-negative integer

n non-negative integer

p positive integer

Q quality factor

s side length of square aperture, μm

2
T temperature, K

t temporal increment, μs

 pectral absorptance

 spatial increment, μm

 complex permittivity, F m-1

 incident angle, degree

1 maximum absorption peak, μm

2 subaltern absorption peak, μm

mnp resonant wavelength of rectangular resonant cavity, μm

 complex permeability, H m-1

 azimuthal angle

3
1 Introduction

The structured surfaces of materials have exhibited significantly different optical and

thermal properties compared with the flat surfaces and find a lot of applications in

optical and thermal engineering, which invokes more and more investigation efforts.

The rapid development of micro-processing technologies, such as micromaching [1-2],

lithographic [3-7], and the colloidal crystal templating method [8-9], make it possible to

fabricate a variety of structured surfaces. A typical approach to obtain the structured

surface is to pattern periodic cavity arrays on the surface of certain materials, which is

extensively used for spectral control of thermal radiation [1-7, 10-19]. The absorptance

of such structured surfaces can be remarkably enhanced due to the excitation of surface

plasmon or phonon polaritons (SPPs) [3-7, 10-16], and microcavity effect [1, 18-21].

So far many researchers have carried out a large number of theoretical and experimental

efforts to understand the mechanism of enhanced absorption and develop their

application. Maruyama et al. experimentally studied the effect of microcavity size on

the thermal emittance of Cr surface and found that the emittance of the structured

surface with square hole arrays significantly increases [1]. They pointed out that the

spectral emittance exhibited a series of absorption peaks for real conductor Cr and these

peaks were located in the vicinity of resonant wavelengths of rectangle resonant cavities.

Sai at al. [5-7] and Zhang et al. [11-12] investigated the spectral emittance of metallic

surface gratings to fabricate high-temperature selective radiator for thermophotovoltaic

(TPV) generation systems and they gave the ideal emittance curve matching with the

spectral response of GaSb photovoltaic cells. A promising application of the structured

4
surfaces of cavity arrays is narrow-band infrared thermal emitters, which is vital in

various applications of the thermal imaging, sensing and spectroscopy of chemical and

biological agents, environmental monitoring, and energy conversion technology [16, 19].

Many researchers have conducted very constructive and fruitful studies on the

narrow-band thermal emitters [3-4, 15-17]，which were mainly based on the enhanced

spectral absorption (ESA) attributed to the excitation of SPPs confined on the

metal-dielectric interface. They designed the thermal emitters that exhibited desirable

characteristics of narrow-band radiation. However, the SPPs resonant wavelength has a

causal relationship with the angle of the radiative electromagnetic wave. With respect to

the air-Ag interface with two dimensional cavity lattice arrays [4], there is the

relationship ksp  (2 /  )sin  e  G (where ksp is the wave vector of surface plasmons,

 is the incident angle, e is a unit vector in the plane of incidence in the surface

plane, and G is the surface reciprocal lattice vector). According to this relationship, it

is obvious that the surface plasmons is angle-dependence. Therefore, the shortcoming of

this type of emitters is that the position of the dominative emission peak has a strong

dependence on the emissive angle, so that it is impossible to utilize this technique to

build a structure with high emission at the same wavelength in all directions. On the

other hand, the characteristic of enhanced thermal absorption/emission due to the

microcavity effect is angle-independent [20-21]. Therefore, an intuitive idea is to

fabricate a narrow-band emitter by means of the microcavtiy effect.

Design of structured surfaces with as high emissive property for some specified

wavelengths and as high reflectance for other wave bands as possible stimulated further

investigation. One of intuitive ideas is to fabricate some structured surfaces with noble

5
metals, which utilizes the inherent higher reflectance of metals. In this paper, we

investigate a structured surface of silver plate consisting of square lattice arrays of

close-packed rectangular microcavities for selective improvement of thermal

absorption/emission. A silver film with two-dimensional periodic aperture arrays is

attached on the surface of the microcavities. The purpose of selecting this structured

silver film is twofold: Firstly, the selective transmission of electromagnetic wave at

some special wavelength can be realized, which is so-called extraordinary transmission

phenomenon [26]. Secondly, the microcavity effect is utilized to capture the transmitted

electromagnetic energy in the hollow cavities below the structured silver film, which

will greatly improve the emissive ability of the structured surfaces. The spectral

properties of the structured surface are simulated in the infrared region from 2μm to

7.5μm by means of the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. From

computational examples, we will discuss the effects of structural parameters such as the

size of square aperture and the depth of rectangular cavity on the spectral properties of

the structured surfaces. In addition, the effect of incident angle on the spectral feature of

the structured surface as well as its distribution against the azimuthal angle is studied.

Although numerical computation is directly conducted for the spectral absorptance of

the structured surfaces, application of Kirchhoff’s law will leads to the spectral

emittance of the surfaces.

2 Computational Model
2.1 Calculation Model

As shown in Fig. 1(a), a silver plate is patterned with square arrays of micron sized

6
rectangular cavities with a lattice period a. The microcavities are arranged periodically

and symmetrically in the x- and y-directions. The rectangular block marked by dashed

lines is a unit cell for the computation region，which is intercepted as a representative

cell from the whole structured surface. Figure 1(b) describes the cross section of the unit

cell along y-z plane. The side length of internal rectangular cavity are lx , l y and d in

along the x-, y- and z-directions, respectively. For the sake of simplicity, lx is set to be

equal to l y , i.e., square internal cavities are considered. Parameter s stands for the side

length of square aperture which connects the internal cavity and outside vacuum and the

depth of the aperture is d a . The thickness of the structure is d out which is generally

required to be thick enough to make the transmittance be zero. The whole structure is

submerged in the vacuum and its extension along x- and y-directions is assumed to be

infinite. Figure 1(c) shows the orientation relationship between the incident wave and

the interface as well as the feature of incident wave. The incident angle  is defined as

the angle between incident wave vector and the normal of interface. And the azimuthal

angle  is constituted by projection of incident wave vector at the surface and the

x-axis. Herein, electric field component of the incident wave is set to be perpendicular

to the incident plane. All these parameters play respective roles in shaping the spectral

characteristics of the silver structured surface. The influence of the structural parameters

(s and d in ) and the incident angle  as well as azimuthal angle  on the spectral

properties will be investigated hereinafter. Without loss of generality, the following

structural parameters are set for numerical computation a=2 μm , lx  l y =1.5 μm ,

s =0.9 μm , d a  0.1μm
 , din  2μm and dout  d a  din  0.5μm . The optical

parameters of silver are obtained from the data base in reference [22].

7
2.2 The Numerical Approach

When the characteristic size of micro-structure is in the same order or even smaller

order of the thermal radiation wavelength, the near-field effect of thermal radiation must

be taken into account and one should pay attention to the interaction between

electromagnetic wave and the micro-structure during the thermal radiation process. In

such cases, the traditional theory of thermal radiation such as radiation transfer equation

fails to get insight into the thermal radiation of such structured surfaces. It is necessary

to utilize the Maxwell’s equations to describe the electromagnetic propagation in the

micro-structure. For the sake of completeness, a ser of governing equations are

described as follows:

 D
   H  t

 D E
 (1)
   E   B
 t
 B  H


where E , Η , D , Β ,  and  denote the electric field, the magnetic field, electric

flux density, magnetic flux density, complex permittivity and complex permeability,

respectively. For isotropic materials, there are the relation    0 r and   0  r , in

which  r and  r generally denote the relative complex permittivity and relative

complex permeability, respectively.

Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods are common approaches for

solving the above-mentioned time-dependent Maxwell’s equations. Among them the

Yee algorithm is popular because of its simplicity and flexibility [23-24]. One may find

plenty of publications on its application to numerical computation of the Maxwell’s curl

8
equations. The whole solution region is discretized with a large number of such cells

[24]. The central difference approximations are applied to both the temporal and spatial

derivatives of Eqs. (1). According to Courant stability condition [24], in order to ensure

the convergence of the algorithm, there is the relationship between the temporal

increment t and the spatial increment: t   /( 3c) , in which c is the speed of

light. Herein, we assume t   /(2c) .

The FDTD simulation region is schematically shown in Fig. 2. The target region is

the rectangular parallelepiped region plotted out from the structure model by dashed

lines (as shown in Fig. 1(a)). Once the computation region is confirmed, the

computational grids are generated and the corresponding electromagnetic parameters

are assigned to each grid. The incident plane wave is introduced into the solution region

by the terms of a modulated Gaussian pulse [24]. As shown in Fig. 2, the periodic

boundary conditions (PBCs) are used in x- and y-directions. The modal absorbing

boundary conditions (modal ABCs) are employed in z-direction in order to maintain no

reflection on the boundary. Electric and magnetic fields on the termination boundary

can be calculated according to the electromagnetic field at the nodes next to the

boundary by means of the modal current and voltage. The details of the modal ABC can

be referred to the literature [25]. Once the values of electromagnetic fields on the

boundaries are obtained, the closure of the iterative procedure of Maxwell's equations is

realized within the whole simulation region.

As shown in Fig. 2, the reflection surface and transmission surface are located at

both sides of the target region. In fact, these two fictitious surfaces are introduced to

respectively collect the reflected and transmitted electromagnetic energy from the target

9
region on two surfaces in order to calculate the reflectance, transmittance and

absorptance of the structured surfaces.

3 Results and Discussions

In order to reduce the numerical dispersion arising from difference approximation, we

choose the spatial increment as one-hundredth of the minimum computing wavelength,

and herein it is set to 0.02 μm . According to the stability condition t   /(2c) , the

temporal increment can be obtained to be 3.33 1011 μs . The iterative process is

implemented 100000 time steps long. After this procedure is complete, incident energy,

reflected energy and transmission energy are calculated by Fourier transform and

Poynting theorem. Consequently, it is easy to obtain reflectance, transmittance and

absorptance. Hereinafter, the influences of structural parameters and incident angle on

the absorptance are discussed.

3.1 Effect of the parameter s

By means of the computational results, one may first investigate the transmittance

spectra of silver film with two-dimension periodic square aperture arrays. The inset at

the bottom right corner of Fig. 3 represents a unit cell of the structured silver film with

the lattice constant a (=2 μm ), and aperture size s (=0.6, 0.9, 1.2 and 1.5 μm ). The

thickness of silver film is 0.1 μm . The ratio of aperture area to the unit cell area varies

from 0.09 to 0.5625 as the parameter s increases from 0.6 μm to 1.5 μm . Figure 3

clearly reveals that the transmittance of this structured silver film is enhanced and is

numerically larger than the ratio values above-mentioned corresponding to the

wavelengths range from 2.0 to 2.5 μm , which is the so-called extraordinary transmission

10
phenomenon [26]. This fact implies us that for the purpose of fabricating a structured

emitter with enhanced spectral absorption/emission, one of intuitive ideas is to combine

the extraordinary transmission performance of such structured films and the enhanced

absorption feature of some microcavity structures that confines the electromagnetic

energy transmitted through the above-mentioned film surface and will not make the

transmitted energy leak out from the microcavity structures.

Further computation validates this idea. As shown in Fig.4, the normal spectral

absorptance of the structured surface varies with the parameter s from 0.9 μm to 1.5 μm .

In this figure, 101 / 011 represents the maximum absorption peak wavelength, which

will be described in detail later on. As indicated by the curves in Fig. 4, the structured

surface possesses the spectral feature of peak absorption. Compared Fig. 4 with Fig. 3,

the absorption peak positions of Fig. 4 exhibit red-shift towards long-wavelength with

respect to the enhanced transmittance wavelengths of structured silver film. This

characteristic demonstrates that the existence of rectangular cavity has a distortion

effect on the spectral property of structured silver film. The peak intensity is obviously

enhanced with increase in the parameter s from 0.6 μm to 0.9 μm , which is the direct

result of the increase of electromagnetic energy entering the rectangular hollow cavity.

With the further increase in parameter s, the electromagnetic wave entering the cavity

can not be well confined in the microcavity which makes the electromagnetic energy

leak out from cavity severely. Thus one can clearly find from Fig. 4 that the intensity of

absorption peak tends to weak when the value of s increases from 0.9 μm to 1.5 μm . In

addition, it is also found that the smaller the value of the parameter s the narrower the

bandwidth of absorption peak. These features of the spectra can be attributed to the

11
microcavity resonant effect.

The resonant wavelength of the rectangular resonator formed by perfectly electric

conductor (PEC) can be calculated by the following equations [27]:

2
mnp  (2)
2
m  n   p
2 2

       
 lx   l y   lz 

where lx ，l y and l z denote the length of cavity in x-，y- and z-directions, respectively.

Herein, l x  l y ， l z  d in . m，n and p denote the number of semi-standing wave along

lx ， l y and l z . m and n are non-negative integers while they can not be zero together,

and p is a positive integer.

Although there exist a series of values of the resonant wavelength corresponding to

different wave modes inside a cavity , the calculation results from Eq. (2) show that

101 and 011 correspond to the maximum resonant wavelength. Their values are the

same and are equal to 2.4 μm from Eq. (2). Figure 4 indicates there are absorption peaks

in the vicinity of the wavelength of 2.6 μm , which is the synergic effect of 101 and

011 modes. As the aperture parameter s decreases gradually, the absorption peak shifts

towards the resonant wavelength obtained from Eq. (2). The electromagnetic wave

entering the rectangular cavity couples with that reflected by walls of cavity and thus

the standing wave is built up. The resonant wavelength corresponds to the wavelength

can establish standing wave in the rectangular cavity. The increase of s would result in

two sequels, on the one hand more electromagnetic energy goes into the cavity, on the

other hand the standing wave in the rectangular cavity is broken down further which

leads to more electromagnetic energy escape from the cavity. Therefore, an optimal

peak absorption spectrum can be achieved by choosing a rational value of s. In addition,

12
it is also found that the peak position shifts towards long-wave slightly compared with

resonant wavelength, even if the cavity is almost closed. Compared with that formed by

PEC, the silver resonant cavity has a longer resonant wavelength which is due to the

skin depth of silver. By introducing the expression of the skin depth at wavelength  ,

dp   /(2 k ) , in which k is extinction coefficient, one obtains dp=20~30nm at the

wavelength from 2 μm to 4 μm . For a narrow-band emitter, quality factor (Q) is widely

used to evaluate its performance. The parameter Q is defined as Q  f / f 0 , where f

is the full frequency width at half maximum of the absorption peak and f 0 is the

frequency corresponding to the peak wavelength. The higher the Q, the narrower and

the sharper the peak in the curve becomes. The numerical computation shows that

parameter Q is dependent on the aperture size and it is equal to 117, 36, 11.6 and 6.6

corresponding to the aperture size s=0.6, 0.9, 1.2 and 1.5 μm , respectively. The features

of high absorptance in a narrow wavelength range and low absorptance at the

wavelength outside the absorption peak make the structured silver surface be a suitable

candidate for a narrow-band infrared thermal emitter in energy conversion systems.

3.2 Effect of the parameter d in

Now we consider the case when the parameter d in is 1 μm , 2 μm and 4 μm while

other parameters are maintained as the original ones. The absorption spectra are plotted

in Fig.5. From Eq. (2), one finds that the maximum resonant wavelengths in the case of

d in  1μm
 , 2μm and 4 μm correspond to 110 , 101 (and 011 ) and 101 (and

011 ), whose values are 2.13 μm , 2.4 μm and 2.8 μm , respectively. The absorption

spectra display peaks in the vicinity of the three resonant wavelengths, respectively.

When d in increases from 1 μm to 2 μm , the bandwidth of maximum absorption peak

13
tend to narrow and the intensity is enhanced, which imply a much intenser excitation of

microcavity resonant effect. With the further increase of d in to 4 μm , the bandwidth of

maximum absorption peak further tend to narrow, however the intensity declines to a

certain extent. Simultaneously, the sub-peak corresponding to 102 (and 012 ) becomes

very obvious. In order to illustrate the impact of the subaltern absorption peak 2 on

the maximum absorption peak 1 , we calculate the ratio r of the spectral radiation power

corresponding to two absorption peaks 1 and 2 . Herein, we assume that the

maximum absorption peaks 1 corresponds to the maximum spectral radiation power.

According to Planck’s Law, we get the following formula:

c12 5
 (2 ) Eb (2 )  (2 ) exp  c2 /(2T )   1  (2 )  1  exp  c2 /(1T )   1
5

r     (3)
 (1 ) Eb (1 )  (1 ) c115  (1 )  2  exp  c2 /(2T )   1
exp  c2 /(1T )   1

where,  (1 ) and  (2 ) denote the normal spectral absorptance corresponding to 1

and 2 , which are equal to the normal spectral emittance. The first radiation constant

c1  3.742 1016 Wm 2 and the second radiation constant c2  1.4388 10 2 mK . T is

the temperature when 1 corresponds to the maximum spectral radiation power.

For din  2μm and 4 μm , the values of spectral emittance corresponding to

maximum absorption peak 1 and sub-peak 2 as well as the ratio r are shown in

Table. 1. For din  2μm , the spectral radiation power of sub-peak is approximately half

of that of the maximum peak. According to this property, it is known that the

electromagnatic energy emits mainly at the wavelength range of the close vicinity of

maximum absorption peak. However, in the case of din  4μm , the spectral radiation

power of sub-peak is larger than that of the maximum peak, which deteriorates the

14
dominance of the maximum absorption peak on the thermal radiation. Therefore, one

can modify the depth of the rectangular cavity to adjust the position and intensity of

absorption peak in order to achieve an optimal absorption spectral characteristic.

3.3 Effect of scale of structural patameters

In order to investigate how the spectral absorptance varies with the scale of structural

parameters, we double the whole structural parameters, and plot the absorption

spectrum in Fig. 6. The absorption spectrum corresponding to the original parameters is

also charted in the same figure for comparison. In this case, the absorption peaks

corresponding to the maximum resonant wavelength 101 (and 011 ) are at the

positions of 5.071 μm and 2.6385 μm . The ratio of the two wavelengths is equal to

1.922, which is similar to that of structural parameters. It should be noted that the

intensities of absorption peaks do not change significantly but the peak positions shift

towards higher wavelength in the proportion of structural parameters. According to Eq.

(3), the values of parameter r are calculated and equal to 0.525 and 0.464 before and

after magnifying the scale of the whole structural parameters. There is just a little

difference between the two values, indicating that the influences of sub-peak on the

dominant peak 101 (and 011 ) are similar to each other in the two cases. These

spectral properties clearly demonstrate that one can shrink or magnify the scale of the

structural sizes so that the absorption peak is located at the position we look forward to.

3.4 Effect of incident angle  and azimuthal angle 

Figure 7 shows the relationship between the spectral absorptance and the incident angle

 . Here the absorptance curves for three wavelengths of 2.6657 μm , 2.6385 μm and

2.6059 μm are illustrated from the numerical simulation. The reason of selecting these

15
wavelengths is that the wavelength of 2.6385 μm corresponds to the position of the

maximum absorption peak as an incident beam normally impinges on the structured

surface and the half value of the absorption peak is approximately located at the

wavelengths of 2.6657 μm and 2.6059 μm . The curves corresponding to these

wavelengths clearly reveal the incident angle-dependent variation of the absorption peak

of the structured surface. The three curves exhibit a common feature that the

absorptance decreases with increase in the incident angle. The absorptance of the

structured surface for the wavelength of 2.6385 μm is always larger than those of other

two wavelengths. This phenomenon implies that the absorption peak position does not

yield any deflection with the variation of the incident angle except that only the

absorption magnitude exhibits the decrease tendency decrease with increase in the

incident angle. In other words, the absorption peak position of the structured surface

independent of the incident angle and its magnitude is dependent on the incident angle.

Therefore, it is possible to fabricate an emitter of such structured surface with high

emission in all directions at a given wavelength.

One type of narrow-band radiation device has been widely reported, which is based

on the enhanced spectral absorption (ESA) attributed to the excitation of SPPs confined

on the metal-dielectric interface [3-4, 15-17]. It is well-known that the SPPs resonant

wavelength is heavily dependent on the angle of radiative electromagnetic wave. In

other words, the peak position of thermal radiation is noticeable dissimilar with a

different observation angle, which has a serious impact on the narrow-band radiation

characteristics of this kind of device. However, by applying the structured surfaces we

proposed to the narrow-band thermal emitters, it is can be ensured to obtain emitters

16
with high emission at the same wavelength in all directions.

The effect of azimuthal angle  on the absorptance at 2.6385 μm is also

simulated and plotted in Fig. 8. When the incident angle is 0 degree, the absorptance is

azimuthal-angle-independent. It's clear that the azimuthal angle effects the absorption

dramasticly when the incident angle sufficiently large. These absorption curves are

symetrical at the 45 degree azimuthal angle due to the symetrical square cavity, and

reach minima at this azimuthal angle.

4 Conclusions

The spectral properties of structured silver surfaces perforated with square lattice arrays

of micron sized rectangular cavities have been investigated by FDTD method. These

structured surfaces exhibit the properties of absorption peak which is attributed to the

excitation of microcavity resonant effect. The intensity of absorption peak first increases

with increase of the parameter s and it will begin to decrease once the maximum value

is reached. It has been found that the position of absorption peak can be adjusted by

altering the depth of rectangular cavity. When the whole structure is magnified, the

absorption peak shifts towards the long-wave in the same proportion as that of the

structured parameters. The dependence of the spectral absorptance on the structured

sizes reveals that the optimization of spectral characteristics can be achieved by the

rational choice of the sizes of structured surface.

The numerical results have revealed that although the peak intensity value the

significant changes with increase in the incident angle, the position of absorption peak

of the structured surface is independent of the incident angle. The structured surface

17
possesses the narrow and sharp absorption features. All the results have indicated that

by means of such structured surfaces, it is possible to fabricate narrow-band thermal

emitters with high emissive ability in all directions at a given wavelength.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the financial support from the National Natural Science

Foundation of China (Grant No. 50936002).

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Figure Captions

Fig. 1 (a) Schematic diagram of the structured silver surface. The rectangular block

marked by dashed lines is a unit cell for the computation region. (b) Cross section of a

unit cell along y-z plane. (c) Orientation relationship between the incident wave and the

interface.

Fig. 2 Schematic diagram of the calculation region for FDTD simulation. Absorbing

boundary conditions are set in z-direction, and periodic boundary conditions are set in x-

and y-directions.

Fig. 3 Transmittance spectra of silver film with two-dimensional periodic square

microcavity arrays. The inset at the bottom right corner is a unit cell of the structured

silver film with the lattice constant a and the aperture size s. The thickness of silver film

is 0.1 μm .

Fig. 4 The relationship between normal spectral absorptance and side length s of square

aperture. The absorption peaks correspond to the resonant wavelength 011 and 101 .

Fig. 5 The d in dependence of the normal absorption spectra of structured silver surface.

The solid line, dashed line and dot line denote the absorption spectra with the parameter

d in =1 μm , 2 μm and 4 μm , respectively.

22
Fig. 6 Effect of the scale of the structural parameters. Solid line: the absorption spectra

corresponding to the original structural parameters; Dashed line: the absorption spectra

corresponding to the double structural parameters.

Fig. 7 Variation of absorptance of the structured with the incident angle at wavelength

of 2.6657 μm (solid line), 2.6385 μm (dash line) and 2.6059 μm (dot line).

Fig. 8 The effect of azimuthal angle on the absorptance at 2.6385 μm .

Table Caption

Table 1 Spectral parameters corresponding to din  2μm and 4 μm

23
Fig. 1

24
Fig. 2

25
26
Fig. 3

27
Fig. 4

28
Fig. 5

29
Fig. 6

30
Fig. 7

31
Fig. 8

32
 Table 1 Spectral parameters corresponding to din  2μm and 4 μm

din μm 1 / μm 2 / μm  (1 )  (2 ) T/K r

2 2.6256 2.15 0.8445 0.494 1103.6 0.528

4 2.953 2.562 0.7547 0.912 981.2 1.148

33