Diffuse reflection in periodic arrayed disk metasurfaces.

Metamaterials of metal-insulator-metal structures represent effective ways in manipulating light absorbance for photodetection, sensing, and energy harvesting etc. Most of the time, specular reflection has been used in characterizing resonances of metamaterials without considering diffuse scattering from their periodic subwavelength units. In this paper, we investigate diffuse reflection in metasurfaces made of periodic metallic disks in the mid-infrared region. Integrating sphere-based spectral measurements indicate that diffuse reflection is dominated by grating diffractions, which cause diffuse scattering in a spectral region with wavelengths less than that of the first order Rayleigh anomaly. The diffuse reflection is greatly enhanced by the metasurface resonance and exhibits a general increase towards shorter wavelengths, which not only causes a significant difference in evaluating the metamaterial resonant absorption efficiency but also a small blue-shift of the resonance frequency. These findings are helpful for designing and analyzing metamaterial resonant properties when diffuse scattering is taken into account.