Two independent significant developments have challenged our understanding of light-matter interaction, one, involves the artificially structured materials known as metamaterials, and the other, relates to the coherent control of quantum systems via the quantum interference route. We theoretically demonstrate that one can engineer the electromagnetic response of composite metamaterials using coherent quantum interference effects. In particular, we predict that these composite materials can show a variety of effects ranging from dramatic reduction of losses to switchable ultraslow-to-superluminal pulse propagation. We propose parametric control of the metamaterials by active tuning of the capacitance of the structures, which is most efficiently engineered by embedding the metamaterial structures within a coherent atomic/molecular medium. This leads to dramatic frequency dependent features, such as significantly reduced dissipation accompanied by enhanced filling fraction. For a Split-ring resonator medium with magnetic properties, the associated splitting of the negative permeability band can be exploited for narrow band switching applications at near infrared frequencies involving just a single layer of such composite metamaterials.
The electromagnetic properties of finite checkerboards consisting of alternating rectangular cells of positive refractive index (epsilon= +1, micro= +1) and negative refractive index (epsilon= -1, micro= -1) have been investigated numerically. We show that the numerical calculations have to be carried out with very fine discretization to accurately model the highly singular behaviour of these checkerboards. Our solutions show that, within the accuracy of the numerical calculations, the focusing properties of these checkerboards are reasonably robust in the presence of moderate levels of dissipation. We also show that even small systems of checkerboards can display focussing effects to some extent.
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