Electromagnetically induced absorption in a three-resonator metasurface system

Mimicking the quantum phenomena in metamaterials through coupled classical resonators has attracted enormous interest. Metamaterial analogs of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) enable promising applications in telecommunications, light storage, slow light and sensing. Although the EIT effect has been studied extensively in coupled metamaterial systems, excitation of electromagnetically induced absorption (EIA) through near-field coupling in these systems has only been sparsely explored. Here we present the observation of the EIA analog due to constructive interference in a vertically coupled three-resonator metamaterial system that consists of two bright and one dark resonator. The absorption resonance is one of the collective modes of the tripartite unit cell. Theoretical analysis shows that the absorption arises from a magnetic resonance induced by the near-field coupling of the three resonators within the unit cell. A classical analog of EIA opens up opportunities for designing novel photonic devices for narrow-band filtering, absorptive switching, optical modulation, and absorber applications.