Spatial dispersion makes optical properties of materials depend on the direction of light propagation. The effect can be applied to control optical emission by sources embedded in such media. We propose a method to determine the radiation pattern of essentially any emitter located in a general spatially dispersive and optically anisotropic medium. The method is based on a decomposition of the source into waves of electric current, each creating optical plane waves whose properties are determined by the wave parameters, the refractive index, and impedance. The method is computationally fast and very accurate even in strongly spatially dispersive plasmonic metamaterials. In particular, we observe large modification of dipole emission in a bifacial and a diffraction-compensating metamaterial. The method is applicable to a large variety of nanostructured materials and, therefore, we believe that it can find numerous applications in nano-optics.

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We develop a general theoretical approach to describing the interaction of metamaterials with optical beams. The metamaterials are allowed to be anisotropic, chiral, noncentrosymmetric, and spatially dispersive. Unlike plane waves, beams can change their field distributions upon interaction with metamaterials, which can reveal new optical effects. Our method is based on a vector form of the angular spectrum representation and a technique to calculate the wave parameters for all required directions of wave propagation. Applying the method to various metamaterial designs, we discover a new optical phenomenon: the conversion of light polarization by spatial dispersion. Because of this phenomenon, the refractive index and impedance cannot be introduced for many metamaterial designs. In such cases, we propose an alternative approach to treating the beam-metamaterial interaction. This work takes a step forward in describing optical metamaterials by moving from unphysical plane waves to realistic optical beams.These matrix equations are similar to equations (1) and (2) of [21]. They reflect the fact that, at any point in the material, the wave is a sum of two waves: a forward propagating wave transmitted by the previous molecular layer and a backward propagating wave reflected in the forward direction by the same layer. These two equations can be written as a single matrix equation in the form J J J J

We design, fabricate, and characterize a metasurface, whose multipole optical response depends significantly on the illumination direction. The metasurface is composed of gold-nanodisc dimers embedded in glass. In spite of their nanoscale size, the dimers exhibit a dominating electric-currentquadrupole response in a wide range of wavelengths around 700 nm when illuminated from one side, and a primarily electric-dipole response when illuminated from the opposite side. This leads to two consequences. First, the reflection coefficient of the metasurface considerably differs for the two sides of illumination. Second, quadrupole excitation results in a significant local enhancement of both electric and magnetic fields around the dimers. Our experimental spectroscopic data are in good agreement with simulations obtained using a multipole expansion model.

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