Highly Transparent Tunable Microwave Perfect Absorption for Broadband Microwave Shielding

Abstract

To shield undesirable microwave radiation to protect electronic systems and human health, microwave perfect absorbers have attracted increasing interests in recent years. However, the opaque or semitransparent nature of most implemented microwave absorbers limit their applications in optics. Here, we demonstrate a high-performance microwave absorber based on an impedance-assisted Fabry-Pérot resonant cavity with an ITO-dielectric-ITO structure without complex nanofabrication. The device features near-unity absorption (99.5% at 14.4 GHz with a 4.5 GHz effective bandwidth), excellent electromagnetic interference shielding performance (24 dB) in the Ku-band, and high optical transparency (89.0% from 400 nm to 800 nm). The peak absorption frequency of the device can be tuned by changing the thickness of glass slab and sheet resistance of ITO films. Our work provides a low-cost and feasible solution for high-performance optically transparent microwave shielding and stealth, paving the way towards applications in areas of microwave and optics.