Infrared radiation, serving as a core medium for heat transfer and information transmission, plays an indispensable role in numerous fields such as military reconnaissance, industrial temperature measurement, gas sensing, and biological imaging [1,2]. Traditional infrared emitters, particularly those based on blackbody radiation principles, have their emission performance largely determined by the bulk properties of the material itself [3]. This leads to inherent limitations like fixed emissivity, non-tunable spectra, and difficulties in controlling directivity, which significantly constrain the development of advanced infrared applications [4]. In recent years, the rise of artificial structural materials, especially metasurfaces, has provided a revolutionary solution to break through this bottleneck [5,6]. According to Kirchhoff's law, the emissivity is equal to the absorptivity for an object in thermodynamic equilibrium. With this law, various metasurface optical absorbers have been proposed to tailor thermal emission [[7], [8], [9]]. By exquisitely designing the geometric shape, size, and arrangement of its unit structures, we can customize infrared emission characteristics, including narrowband, polarization-sensitive, or even specially spatially distributed properties, at the device level, which can be as thin as the order of the wavelength [10]. However, despite the exceptional control over thermal emission offered by such metasurface designs, a significant challenge remains: once the device is fabricated, its emissivity properties are largely fixed. This inherent lack of post-fabrication tunability limits the adaptability of the emitter to dynamic operational requirements or changing environments [[11], [12], [13]].

To address this limitation, achieving dynamic tunability in thermal emitters has attracted significant research interest [[14], [15], [16], [17]]. Various approaches have been explored to actively control the emissive properties of metasurfaces post-fabrication. These strategies typically involve integrating functional materials whose optical properties can be modulated by external stimuli. Notable examples include the electrostatic doping of two-dimensional materials like graphene [18,19], the thermally- or electrically-induced phase transition in materials such as vanadium dioxide (VO2) or Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) [[20], [21], [22]], and the application of mechanical strain to alter the metasurface geometry [23]. Among these promising candidates, epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials have emerged as a particularly attractive platform for dynamic tuning. ENZ materials are characterized by a real part of their dielectric permittivity crossing zero at a specific wavelength, known as the ENZ wavelength, while the imaginary part remains relatively small [24,25]. This unique condition leads to enhanced light-matter interactions, strong field confinement, and high optical nonlinearities, making them ideal for modulating light at the nanoscale [26]. Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs), such as indium tin oxide (ITO), are a widely studied class of ENZ materials. ITO, for instance, exhibits its ENZ wavelength in the near-infrared region around 1550 nm, a feature that can be shifted by altering its carrier density [[27], [28], [29], [30]]. While ENZ-based tunable emitters have demonstrated remarkable progress in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) and terahertz regimes, their potential remains notably underexplored in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) band, representing a critical gap in the current research landscape [[31], [32], [33], [34]].

In this work, we propose an electronically switchable plasmonic metasurface to achieve dynamic thermal emission modulation in the SWIR region. Numerical simulations demonstrate that incorporating a 20 nm-thick ultra-thin ENZ material, specifically, an ITO film, into a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure leads to significantly enhanced and broadened optical absorption. By applying a 3.5 V bias to modulate the carrier density in the ITO layer, the device can be switched from a highly reflective state to a perfectly absorbing one, enabling substantial control over the thermal emission intensity. This efficient electrical tuning strategy renders the proposed method highly attractive from an engineering perspective.