Effects of optical Joule heating in metamaterial absorber: A non-linear recursive feedback optical-thermodynamic multiphysics study

High absorption efficiency of canonical metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structures have been considered as a desirable feature for various photonic and electronic technological applications, including chemical and biomedical sensors, photodetectors, thermal emitters, and solar cells. However, most of the absorption efficiency of metamaterial absorber, calculated without the temperature dependence fails to precisely reproduce the values obtained from experiments. In this study, by using a non-linear recursive feedback optical-thermodynamic numerical analysis we show that optical absorption induced temperature change could affect the permittivity of metal and thus diminish the efficiency of metamaterial absorber. Our work will stimulate factual designs of metamaterial absorbers and also will foster various applications in analyzing absorbing, sensing, emitting and detecting devices based on non-linear optical-thermal coupling effects.