Losses for microwave transmission in metamaterials for producing left-handed materials: The strip wires

TL;DR

This study analyzes the dielectric losses in metamaterials with strip wires for left-handed materials, showing that wire thickness critically affects wave propagation and proposing optimal dimensions to reduce losses.

Contribution

It demonstrates that wire thickness influences dielectric permitivity dominance, providing specific dimensions to optimize transparency in left-handed metamaterials.

Findings

Losses dominate at thin wire dimensions, inhibiting wave propagation.

Thicker wires reduce losses and enable negative permitivity.

Optimal wire thickness is proposed for better metamaterial performance.

Abstract

This paper shows that the effective dielectric permitivity for the metamaterials used so far to obtain left-handed materials, with strip wires 0.003cm thick, is dominated by the imaginary part at 10.6- 11.5 GHz frequencies, where the band pass filter is, and therefore there is not propagation and the wave is inhomogeneous inside the medium. This is shown from finite-differences time-domain calculations using the real permitivity values for the Cu wires. For thicker wires the losses are reduced and the negative part of the permitivity dominates. As the thickness of the wires is critical for the realization of a good transparent left- handed material we propose that the strip wires should have thickness of 0.07-0.1cm and the split ring resonators 0.015-0.03cm