随着超材料研究的不断发展，基于超材料结构设计的一系列太赫兹及红外吸波体引起了国内外广泛关注。由于具有高效的吸波性能，太赫兹及红外吸波超材料在现代隐身技术、节能、绝热、生物化学光谱、红外成像、传感和安检等领域具有广泛的应用前景。通过紧密跟踪国内外太赫兹及红外吸波超材料的最新研究进展，讨论总结了太赫兹及红外吸波超材料的吸波机理。由于材料依靠增强电场强度来实现对电磁波的吸收往往比靠材料本身的损耗吸收电磁波有更高的效率，与传统吸波材料的工作原理不同，超材料在太赫兹及红外波段主要依靠亚波长单元结构的设计，降低其等离子体频率，从而实现表面等离激元场增强效应（SPPs）。基于此，总结归纳了太赫兹及红外吸波超材料研究中 3种有效降低等离子频率的方法，分别为金属表面的周期性结构设计、半导体材料的掺杂和新型碳纳米材料的引入，更加清晰地阐明了表面等离激元场增强效应实现方式。同时，对太赫兹及红外吸波超材料今后的发展给出了自己的认识。

Recent years, with gradually development of metamaterial, a series of THz and infrared absorbers based on metamaterial structures have attracted widespread attention all over the world. Due to the highly efficient absorption performance, THz and infrared metamaterial absorbers(MAs) have wide application prospects in many fields, such as modern stealth technology, energy saving project, thermal insulation field, biochemistry spectrum, infrared imaging, THz sensor, security check and so on. By taking a closely tracking on the latest research at home and abroad, this paper discusses and summarizes the basic operating principle of THz and infrared MAs. It’s universally accepted that the energy absorption is proportional to the loss of absorbing material and the quadratic of electric field strength. Due to the relatively low loss of nature material, it's more efficient to achieve electromagnetic wave absorption by increasing motivated electric field strength than the material loss itself. Different from the traditional material absorbers largely depending on loss, MAs decreases the plasmon polaritons through the design of sub-wavelength structure in THz and infrared frequency region, which contributes the electric field enhancement of surface plasmon polaritons(SPPs). Based on this, the paper summarized three effective methods to decrease the plasmonic frequency by designing periodic structure of metallic surface, doping semi-conductor periodic array and adding new type carbon nanomaterials. And then, a more detailed description for the methods to achieve surface plasmon polaritons(SPPs) is given out. Furthermore, combined with development tendency of metamaterial, the paper also expounded the perspective for the future development of THz and infrared metamaterial absorbers.