Manipulating Electromagnetic Waves with Zero Index Materials

Abstract

Zero-index material is a typical metamaterial with an effective zero refractive index, possessing a variety of exotic electromagnetic properties and particular functionalities. We have considered two kinds of zero-index materials with the first one a nearly matched zero index made of magnetic metamaterial and the second one a radially anisotropic zero index. The magnetic metamaterial-based systems are shown to be significant in wavefront engineering and flexibly tunable by an external magnetic field and a temperature field. The radially anisotropic zero-index-based systems can remarkably enhance the omnidirectional isotropic radiation by enclosing a line source and a dielectric particle within a shell configuration. The physical origin lies in that the dielectric particle effectively rescatters the trapped anisotropic higher order modes and converts them into the isotropic 0th order mode radiated outside the system. The case for the system with the loss is then examined and the energy compensation with a gain particle is also demonstrated.

On the possibility of classical vacuum polarization and magnetization

“…This remarkable quality implies the total reflection of EM waves incident on the wormhole [21,22]. On the other hand, recent research on near-zero permittivity metamaterials has revealed a number of exotic EM properties like, for instance, 'squeeze the EM wave and make it tunnel through a deep subwavelength channel with arbitrary shape' [23]. This offers a perspective of building metamaterial-based analog models for further study of the charged wormhole spacetime.…”