Abstract
We propose a unified scheme to achieve coherent perfect absorption of electromagnetic waves by anisotropic metamaterials. The scheme describes the condition on perfect absorption and offers an inverse design route based on effective medium theory in conjunction with retrieval method to determine practical metamaterial absorbers. The scheme is scalable to frequencies and applicable to various incident angles. Numerical simulations show that perfect absorption is achieved in the designed absorbers over a wide range of incident angles, verifying the scheme. By integrating these absorbers, we further propose an absorber to absorb energy from two coherent point sources. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America