Experimental Demonstration of a Structured Material with Extreme Effective Parameters at Microwaves

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates that an array of crossed metallic wires can act as a nonresonant material with an extremely high index of refraction at microwave frequencies, enabling ultra-subwavelength waveguides.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental verification of a theoretical prediction that crossed metallic wire arrays can achieve extreme effective parameters at microwaves.

Findings

Array of crossed metallic wires exhibits extremely high refractive index.

The material enables ultra-subwavelength waveguiding.

Experimental results confirm theoretical predictions.

Abstract

Following our recent theoretical studies [M. G. Silveirinha, C. A. Fernandes, Phys. Rev. B, 78, 033108, 2008], it is experimentally verified that an array of crossed metallic wires may behave as a nonresonant material with extremely large index of refraction at microwaves, and may enable the realization of ultra-subwavelength waveguides.