Realisation of a humidity sensor based on perfect metamaterial absorber

In this paper, we have proposed and investigated a humidity sensor based on perfect metamaterial absorber. The sensor is composed of three layers, which are metallic particle array on the top, porous silicon in the middle layer and metallic film at the bottom. According to the effective medium approximation, the effective permittivity of porous silicon is mainly determined by the filling fraction of water condensation. It is shown that the resonant wavelength displays significant red-shift with the increasing effective permittivity of porous silicon. Furthermore, the simulation results indicate that the refractive index sensitivity of absorber is high to 249 nm/RIU, which makes our structure be an ideal candidate for evaluating the humidity of environment.