Transparency and perfect absorption of all-dielectric resonant metasurfaces governed by the transverse Kerker effect

Abstract

Dielectric metasurfaces allow us to realize many unique effects in optics, and they can serve as the building blocks of the modern photonic technologies. Here, we suggest theoretically and demonstrate experimentally the effect of high transparency of all-dielectric metasurfaces with meta-atoms supporting the so-called transverse Kerker effect. In contrast to the well-known Huygens' metasurfaces, in our case both phase and amplitude of the incoming wave remain unperturbed at the resonant frequency and, consequently, our novel metasurfaces totally operate in the high-transparency regime. We prove experimentally, in the microwave frequency range, that both phase and amplitude of the waves transmitted through these metasurfaces remain almost unaffected. Also, we demonstrate numerically and experimentally and explain theoretically a novel mechanism for achieving a perfect absorption of the incident light enabled by the resonant response of the dielectric metasurfaces placed on a conducting substrate. In the subdiffractive limit, we show that these effects are mainly determined by the optical response of the constituting meta-atoms rather than collective lattice contributions. With the spectrum scalability, our finding can be extended to the optical frequencies to be employed for energy harvesting, nonlinear phenomena, and filtering of light.