Collective electromagnetic response of discrete metamaterial systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a formalism for understanding how discrete plasmonic resonators interact electromagnetically, revealing how collective effects influence resonance linewidths in metamaterials, with implications for designing tunable optical devices.

Contribution

The authors develop a general formalism for describing electromagnetic interactions in discrete metamaterial systems, explaining collective effects observed in experiments.

Findings

Collective interactions cause system-size dependent narrowing of resonance linewidths.

Narrowing of resonances is highly sensitive to lattice spacing.

The formalism explains recent experimental observations of cooperative metamaterial responses.

Abstract

We develop a general formalism to describe the interactions between a discrete set of plasmonic resonators mediated by the electromagnetic field. The resulting system of equations for closely-spaced meta-atoms represents a cooperative metamaterial response and we find that collective interactions between asymmetric split-ring resonators arranged in a 2D lattice explains the recent experimental observations of system-size dependent narrowing of the transmission resonance linewidth. We further show that this cooperative narrowing depends sensitively on the lattice spacing.