Transmission Losses in Left-handed Materials

Recently it has been shown that due to losses the claims on observation of negative refraction using metamaterials are questionable. In this paper we discus an interesting case that is based in almost zero permeability at a given frequency: zero permeability materials. This represents a way out of the problem of left handed materials, and constitutes a material that acts a band pass filter with a very narrow band. The metamaterials claimed to present negative refraction are j...

We propose a simple and effective way to reduce the losses in left-handed metamaterials by manipulating the values of the effective parameters R, L, and C. We investigate the role of losses of the short-wire pairs and the fishnet structures. Increasing the effective inductance to capacitance ratio, L/C, reduces the losses and the figure of merit can increase substantially, especially at THz frequencies and in the optical regime.

SRR metamaterial is used as a substrate material in a microstrip guided wave structure to determine what the effect is of a material with potentially excessive dispersion or loss or both. A Green's function method readily incorporates the metamaterial permittivity and permeability tensor characteristics. Ab initio calculations are performed to obtain the dispersion diagrams of several complex peopagation constant modes of the structure. Analytical analysis is done for the des...

An exact analytical theory of the electromagnetic waves in metallic photonic crystals with a small volume fraction of a metal is presented. It is shown that there are waves with a very low cutoff frequency $\omega_0$ and that the permittivity $\epsilon$ is negative below $\omega_0$. We show that if the crystal is embedded into a medium with negative $\mu$, it has no propagating modes at any frequency. Thus, such a compound system is not a left handed material (LHM). The recen...

Metal losses affect the performance of every plasmonic or metamaterial structure; dealing with them will determine the degree to which these structures will find practical applications.

We investigate three-dimensional left-handed and related meta-materials based on a fully symmetric multi-gap single-ring SRR design and crossing continuous wires. We demonstrate isotropic transmission properties of a SRR-only meta-material and the corresponding left-handed material which possesses a negative effective index of refraction due to simultaneously negative effective permeability and permittivity. Minor deviations from complete isotropy are due to the finite thickn...

We provide rigorous numerical calculations (using the rigorous coupled-wave analysis) of transmission spectra of various metallic and metamaterial one-dimensional gratings and identify plasmonic resonances responsible for enhanced transmission. We argue that the most important mechanism which influences the resonant transmission is the coupling of incident electromagnetic wave with two plasmonic waves: lengthwise plasmons, which propagates along the grating, and crosswise pla...

The letter contains an important message regarding the numerical modeling of left-handed media (LHM) using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method which remains at the moment one of the main techniques used in studies of these exotic materials. It is shown that conventional implementation of the dispersive FDTD method leads to inaccurate description of evanescent waves in the LHM. This defect can be corrected using the spatial averaging at the interfaces. However, a n...

We report experiments of light transmissivity at wavelengths: 532 and 400 nm, through an Au film with a wedge shape. Our results mimic the negative refraction reported by others for so-called left handed materials. A mimic of negative refraction is observed, even though this medium is well known to be right handed, and thus its refractive index has a positive real part. Analogous results are obtained with a glass wedge at 320nm where absorption dominates. The experiment is ex...

We study the transmission properties of a nonlinear periodic structure containing alternating slabs of a nonlinear right handed material and a linear left handed material. We find that the transmission associated with the zero averaged- refractive- index gap exhibits a bistable characteristic that is relatively insensitive to incident angle. This is in contrast to the nonlinear behavior of the usual Bragg gap