Book Title: Global Perspectives in Multidisciplinary Research and Scholarly Innovation
Editors: Dr. Aditi Deka Pathak, and Prof. Guptajit Pathak
ISBN: 978-81-69297-30-1
Chapter: 6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/714/6
Authors: Kaushal Purohit, Devansh Desai and Dhimahi Patel
Abstract
The performance of conventional materials is intrinsically constrained by their fundamental electromagnetic, mechanical, and optical properties. These properties arise from the atomic constitution and natural microstructure of matter, and they bound the possible ways of wave-matter interactions. Over the last couple of decades, a totally new class of artificially engineered materials called metamaterials has been seen, which has enabled unprecedented control of wave propagation by deliberate design of subwavelength structural elements rather than by chemical composition alone. The metamaterials are often made from a periodic or quasi-periodic distribution of metallic and dielectric inclusions, which are much smaller than the wavelength of the incident radiation. Under the wave illumination with wavelengths much larger than the size of the particular unit cell, these specific structured media can be regarded as effective homogeneous materials characterised by properly engineered macroscopic parameters such as permittivity, permeability, refractive index, impedance, and anisotropy. Most importantly, these effective parameters sometimes may attain values that are not accessible to naturally occurring materials, including negative permittivity, negative permeability, and negative refractive index.