Constructing Hyperbolic Metamaterials with Arbitrary Medium

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for constructing hyperbolic metamaterials using arbitrary materials, overcoming traditional permittivity limitations and enabling new applications in microwave, terahertz, and optical technologies.

Contribution

The authors propose a structure-induced spoof surface plasmon concept allowing arbitrary material selection for hyperbolic metamaterials with unlimited effective permittivity ranges.

Findings

Designed three novel hyperbolic metamaterials validated numerically and experimentally.

Demonstrated an all-metal low-loss hyperbolic metamaterial filled with air.

Showed the method's potential for applications like super-resolution imaging and cloaking.

Abstract

Recent advances in hyperbolic metamaterials have spurred many breakthroughs in the field of manipulating light propagation. However, the unusual electromagnetic properties also put extremely high demands on its compositional materials. Limited by the finite relative permittivity of the natural materials, the effective permittivity of the constructed hyperbolic metamaterials is also confined to a narrow range. Here, based on the proposed concept of structure-induced spoof surface plasmon, we prove that arbitrary materials can be selected to construct the hyperbolic metamaterials with independent relative effective permittivity components. Besides, the theoretical achievable ranges of the relative effective permittivity components are unlimited. As proofs of the method, three novel hyperbolic metamaterials are designed with their functionalities validated numerically and experimentally by specified directional propagation. To further illustrate the superiority of the method, an all-metal low-loss hyperbolic metamaterial filled with air is proposed and demonstrated. The proposed methodology effectively reduces the design requirement for hyperbolic metamaterials and provides new ideas for the scenarios where large permittivity coverage is needed such as microwave and terahertz focus, super-resolution imaging, electromagnetic cloaking, and so on.