Metamaterials: a new frontier of science and technology

Abstract

Metamaterials, artificial composite structures with exotic material properties, have emerged as a new frontier of science involving physics, material science, engineering and chemistry. This critical review focuses on the fundamentals, recent progresses and future directions in the research of electromagnetic metamaterials. An introduction to metamaterials followed by a detailed elaboration on how to design unprecedented electromagnetic properties of metamaterials is presented. A number of intriguing phenomena and applications associated with metamaterials are discussed, including negative refraction, sub-diffraction-limited imaging, strong optical activities in chiral metamaterials, interaction of meta-atoms and transformation optics. Finally, we offer an outlook on future directions of metamaterials research including but not limited to three-dimensional optical metamaterials, nonlinear metamaterials and ''quantum'' perspectives of metamaterials (142 references).

Particle selection through topographic templates in nematic colloids

“…Colloidal systems are an important class of metamaterials [1,2], having unusual optical and mechanical properties. Assembling them into mesoscale structures with controlled symmetries is a primary challenge for their use in a wide variety of applications, including responsive devices [3] and photonic band-gap crystals [4].…”

Predictor Packing in Developing Unprecedented Shaped Colloidal Particles

“…One-dimensional nanowires [2] and twodimensional free-floating sheets have been developed by strong dipole-dipole interaction [3]. To structure matter on the scale of length comparable or smaller to the wavelength of light can deliver phenomenal optical properties [4,5]. The catalytic activity of metallic nanostructures is enhanced significantly on controlling phase [6,7].…”

Structure-Induced Ultratransparency in Photonic Crystals

“…The theory of TO [23][24][25][26][27] promises many novel and interesting applications, such as invisibility cloaks [23,25,31,32], concentrators [33], illusion optics devices [34][35][36], and simulations of cosmic phenomena [37,38]. Generally, the TO devices are realized by using metamaterials [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], which require complicated designs of electric and magnetic resonances, hindering the realization and applications in practice. In fact, most of the previous TO experiments were realized by using the so-called reduced parameters, which maintain the refractive behavior, but sacrifice the impedance matching as well as the perfect transparency [25,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

“…However, perfect transparency has never been realized in natural transparent solid materials such as glass because of the impedance mismatch with free space. On the other hand, in the past decades, artificial EM materials like metamaterials [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] have been proposed to realize unusual EM properties beyond natural materials. However, most of the researches were focused on the realization of abnormal refractive behaviors such as negative refraction.…”