Hyperbolic metamaterial lens with hydrodynamic nonlocal response

TL;DR

This paper explores how hydrodynamic nonlocal effects influence hyperbolic metamaterials, revealing significant impacts on their dispersion and focusing properties, and proposes experimental detection methods.

Contribution

It analytically derives nonlocal corrections to hyperbolic metamaterials and demonstrates their substantial effects on lens focusing behavior, which was not previously characterized.

Findings

Nonlocal effects significantly alter dispersion curves.

Hydrodynamic nonlocal response can improve lens focusing.

Proposed near-field measurement to detect nonlocal effects.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of hydrodynamic nonlocal response in hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs), focusing on the experimentally realizable parameter regime where unit cells are much smaller than an optical wavelength but much larger than the wavelengths of the longitudinal pressure waves of the free-electron plasma in the metal constituents. We derive the nonlocal corrections to the effective material parameters analytically, and illustrate the noticeable nonlocal effects on the dispersion curves numerically. As an application, we find that the focusing characteristics of a HMM lens in the local-response approximation and in the hydrodynamic Drude model can differ considerably. Interestingly, sometimes the nonlocal theory predicts significantly better focusing. Thus, to detect whether nonlocal response is at work in a hyperbolic metamaterial, we propose to measure the near-field distribution of a hyperbolic metamaterial lens.