Metamaterials face-off [Speaker's Corner

Abstract

In 1967, a Soviet physicist named Veselago published an article that explored the technical ramifi cations if a material with negative permittivity or permeability was discovered. However, it was nearly 30 years later that the British physicist Pendry first described how traditional materials could be periodically loaded with electrically small and closely spaced split-ring resonators or parallel wires to produce an aggregate material that he claimed exhibited either macroscopic negative permeability or permittivity. Soon after, David Smith et al. reported the results of a work that combined such periodic loading to produce material that was also claimed to exhibit both negative permeability and permittivity. About a year later, Caloz and Itoh, Eleftheriades et al., and Oliner independently described how these properties could be realized by periodically loading traditional trans mission media with electrically small and closely spaced series capacitance and shunt inductance. Since these seminal publications appeared, hundreds of papers and articles and several books have been written about this class of materials and their applications.