Calculations of the Effective Permitivity of a Periodic Array of Wires and the Left-Handed Materials

TL;DR

This paper uses finite-difference time-domain simulations to calculate the effective permittivity of periodic copper wire arrays, revealing the critical dependence on wire thickness for achieving left-handed metamaterials.

Contribution

It provides a detailed computational analysis of how wire thickness affects the effective permittivity in metamaterials, highlighting the importance of thickness for transparency and left-handed behavior.

Findings

Thin wires (0.003cm) have a dominant imaginary permittivity at 11GHz.

Thicker wires (10-20 times thicker) can produce transparent left-handed materials.

The effective permittivity is critically dependent on wire thickness.

Abstract

We present finite-differences time- domain calculations of the effective permitivity of a periodic array of Cu strip wires that are an ingredient needed in metamaterials for obtaining left-handed materials. We use the Cu frequency dependent permitivity. The result is critically dependent of the wire thickness. In particular for the wires of 0.003cm thickness used in metamaterials experiments the imaginary part of the effective permitivity dominates over the real part, which is slightly positive at 11GHz. Wires 10 - 20 times thicker may provided a good transparent left-handed material.