On the Nonlocal Response of Multilayer Optical Metamaterials

• Published in: ACS photonics Vol. 2; no. 8; pp. 1129 - 1134
• Main Authors: Ghasemi, Rasta, Le Roux, Xavier, Lupu, Anatole, de Lustrac, André, Degiron, Aloyse
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 19.08.2015
• Subjects: surface plasmon resonances; three-dimensional nanocomposites; optical metamaterials
• ISSN: 2330-4022; 2330-4022
• DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.5b00180

We provide a microscopic description of a three-dimensional infrared metamaterial composed of stacked arrays of gold cut wires buried in a dielectric host. We show with numerical and theoretical arguments that the response of this structure is intrinsically nonlocal and explain why this property makes it robust to fabrication errors such as misalignments between adjacent levels of cut wires. We then validate these claims by fabricating and characterizing experimental samples comprising up to four layers of cut wires. These results relax the fabrication tolerances of bulk optical metamaterials composed of strongly interacting layers and also imply that their effective parameters cannot be inferred from retrieval methods based on a purely local description of the permittivity and permeability.