Metamaterials with 100% absorption over a large frequency range

Although very desirable for detector applications and photovoltaic cells, thin film materials that absorb all incoming light are extremely hard to find. In this work, we introduce a metamaterial consisting of a meandering wire of only a few nanometer thickness that can absorb all incident radiation when the film is illuminated at the critical angle for total internal reflection. The observed effect occurs for s-polarized radiation in very lossy metals or dielectrics for which the imaginary part of the dielectric constant is much larger than the real part.