Surface Plasmon Driven Electric and Magnetic Resonators for Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for designing metamaterials by leveraging surface plasmons on metal surfaces to create electric and magnetic resonators, enabling operation at higher frequencies than traditional designs.

Contribution

It presents a new technique that uses surface plasmons to drive non-resonant structures, expanding the frequency range and potential applications of metamaterials.

Findings

Resonators follow surface plasmon dispersion of the metal

Metamaterials operate at extremely high frequencies

New interface between plasmonics and metamaterials

Abstract

Using interplay between surface plasmons and metamaterials, we propose a new technique for novel metamaterial designs. We show that surface plasmons existing on thin metal surfaces can be used to "drive" non-resonant structures in their vicinity to provide new types of electric and magnetic resonators. These resonators strictly adhere to surface plasmon dispersion of the host metal film. The operating frequency of the resultant metamaterials can be scaled to extremely high frequencies, otherwise not possible with conventional split-ring-resonator-based designs. Our approach opens new possibilities for theory and experiment in the interface of plasmonics and metamaterials to harvest many potential applications of both fields combined.