Homogenization procedure for a metamaterial and local violation of the second principle of thermodynamics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that homogenization of certain metamaterials can lead to unphysical behaviors, including local violations of the second law of thermodynamics, challenging traditional criteria for medium homogeneity.

Contribution

It analytically shows that effective parameters can be assigned to symmetric metamaterials even when they are not truly homogeneous, revealing potential unphysical effects.

Findings

Homogenization can produce unphysical effective behaviors.

Effective magnetic response can be assigned without actual magnetism.

Local violations of thermodynamics can occur in non-homogeneous regimes.

Abstract

Classical theory of crystals states that a medium to be considered homogeneous must satisfy the following requirements: a) the dimension of the elementary cell must be much smaller than the incident wavelength; b) the sample must contain a large number of elementary cells, i.e. it must be macroscopic with respect to wavelength. Under these conditions, macroscopic quantities can be introduced in order to describe the optical response of the medium. We analytically demonstrate that for a symmetric elementary cell those requirements can be relaxed, and it is possible to assign a permittivity and a permeability to a composite structure, even if the metamaterial cannot be considered homogeneous under the requirements stated above. However, the effective permittivity and permeability in some cases may give rise to unphysical, effective behaviors inside the medium, notwithstanding the fact that they satisfy requirements like being Kramers-Kronig pairs, for example, and are consistent with all the linear properties outside the structure (i.e. reflection, transmission, and absorption at all frequencies). In some situations the medium is assigned a magnetic response even though the medium is not magnetically active. In particular, we demonstrate that the homogenization procedure can lead to a medium that locally violates the second principle of thermodynamics. We also show that, in the non-homogeneous regime, it is not possible to describe the nonlinear behavior of the structure using an effective parameters approach, despite the possibility to assign an effective linear refractive index.