Perfect metamaterial absorber improved laser-driven flyer

Laser driven flyer (LDF) can drive small particles to ultrahigh speed (several km/s) by feeding pulse laser light, and exhibits giant application prospect in both of the civilian and military regions, such as the ignition of missile and spacecraft and dynamic high-pressure loading. In this work, we demonstrate a high-performance LDF by using the perfect metamaterial absorber (PMA) to improve the energy utilization efficiency of light. The designed Ag nanopillar array in anodic aluminum oxide templates (APA-AAO) were skillfully fabricated in-situ on the flyer layer surface, which can greatly reduce the reflectivity from 93% of the pure Al foil flyers to about 5% of the APA-AAO enhanced flyers. Our systematically transient analysis reveals that this ultralow reflectivity, together with the well-formed metal structure on Al foil, greatly improve both of the electron temperature and sustaining time of plasma formed in the ablating layer, and further enhances the acceleration process at both of the initial detonation wave generation stage (0–10 ns) and the following thermal expansion stage (10–200 ns). The final speed of the flyer generated in the PMA-enhanced LDF approach to 1730 m/s, which is about 1.4 times larger than that (1250 m/s) of the pure Al foil flyers. The transient electron temperature, transient flyer shadowgraph, plasma sustaining time, velocity, and accelerated velocity have been investigated systematically in this work. This PMA enhanced LDF provides an effective method for obtaining high-speed microparticles, and opens up a new perspective and guidance for designing high-performance LDF.