Metastructures: From physics to application (original) (raw)
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Throughout human history, the control of light, electricity and heat has evolved to become the cornerstone of various innovations and developments in electrical and electromagnetic technologies. Wireless communications, laser and computer technologies have all been achieved by altering the way light and other energy forms act naturally and how to manage them in a controlled manner. At the nanoscale, to control light and heat, matured nanostructure fabrication techniques have been developed in the last two decades, and a wide range of groundbreaking processes have been achieved. Photonic crystals, nanolithography, plasmonics phenomena and nanoparticle manipulation are the main areas where these techniques have been applied successfully and led to an emergent material sciences branch known as metamaterials. Metamaterials and functional material development strategies are focused on the structures of the matter itself, which has led to unconventional and unique electromagnetic properti...
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NPG Asia Materials, 2011
T he idea of a new class of media that has unusual properties with respect to electromagnetic wave propagation is generally attributed to the Russian physicist Victor Veselago [1]. He considered what would be the consequences if one could create or fi nd materials for which the dielectric permittivity ε and the magnetic permeability μ were both negative. He deduced that one striking outcome would be that the refractive index of the material would seem to be negative, causing the incident and refracted waves to lie on the same side of the normal to the interface between a 'standard' medium and the new medium. Th is phenomenon is now known as negative refraction ) and is associated with other phenomena in which the sign of the refractive index is reversed, such as Doppler shift, Cherenkov angle, Goos-Hänchen shift and radiation pressure. Another consequence of a negative refractive index is that the electric, magnetic and wave vectors form a left-handed triad, rather than the right-handed triad found in dielectrics. For this reason, such materials are called left-handed media, or sometimes double-negative media.
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Journal of The Optical Society of America B-optical Physics, 2009
Metamaterials constitute a new area of science that is expanding our fundamental understanding of the behavior of the propagation of electromagnetic waves and their interactions, and providing new solutions for a wide range of applications from optical communications and defense to biological imaging. In this brief review, we focus on recent progress in theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies of linear and nonlinear optical properties of negative index materials and in the emerging field of transformation optics.