Abstract

A great deal of attention has recently been attracted to a new type of smart materials, so-called left-handed media or negative index materials, which exhibit highly unusual electromagnetic properties and promise unique device applications, including perfect lens. Left-handed materials require negative permeability and negative permittivity, an extreme condition that, at high frequency, no natural atomic materials are known to exhibit. An ingenious idea of generating high-frequency magnetic response by nonmagnetic metallic resonators has opened a floodgate for manufacturing negative index materials in the whole range of the electromagnetic spectrum [1].

© 2007 Optical Society of America