Disorder in metamaterials

Abstract

Since the emergence of the metamaterial, the disorder within artificially structured materials has been a subject of extensive discussions. Metamaterial at optical frequency can be considered as a kind of man-made architecture material possessing unusual properties. One of its remarkable features is that the equivalent permittivities on different directions differ from each other and can be varied by designing its structure elaborately. It is worthwhile mentioning, that this property enhanced by the presence of the disorder promises that metamaterial may serve for surface plasmons (SPs) propagating with more flexible performances than conventional metal or ordered metamaterial. For instance, dealing with the photonic crystals, some disorder can dramatically degrade the reflection and transmission properties, which are based on constructive interferences. The present chapter covers three different models of the disordered metamaterials: (i) rotational disorder, (ii) sliding disorder, (iii) positional disorder.