The Extraordinary Features and Capabilities of Metamaterials

Indianapolis, IN

The experimental realization of unnatural phenomena such as invisibility cloaking, perfect lensing, negative index of refraction, and many others all function to ignite the field of Condensed Matter Physics and the application and demonstration of devices becomes essential for the continued growth of this field. Solid State Physics, with regard to Metamaterials and other novel electromagnetic media, being quite intriguing, also promises a great number of technological advances in the future to come. These advances are very exotic and applicable toward devices in a generation that sees much growth and prosper in these areas. In this paper, we explore the exotic properties of Metamaterials, tunable, artificially composite structures capable of many useful applications. Metamaterials have been shown to exhibit foreign properties not seen in nature. Utilizing these unique materials, one can demonstrate features such as the Metamaterials perfect absorber, emitter, negative-index material, and wave guiding, namely invisibility cloaking. I discuss our achievement of a Metamaterial invisibility cloak in the laboratory, the creation of a Metamaterial sample possessing a negative index of refraction, and our fabrication and characterization of a Metamaterial perfect absorber yielding near-unity absorption of 98% at a wavelength of 6 microns. These areas, as well as their applications, along with future outlook for electromagnetic Metamaterials will be the focus of this paper.