Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
Nat Commun. 2014 Dec 5;5:5638. doi: 10.1038/ncomms6638.
In recent years, the concept of metamaterials has offered platforms for unconventional tailoring and manipulation of the light-matter interaction. Here we explore the notion of 'static optics', in which the electricity and magnetism are decoupled, while the fields are temporally dynamic. This occurs when both the relative effective permittivity and permeability attain near-zero values at a given operating frequency. We theoretically investigate some of the resulting wave features in bounded scenarios, such as unusual radiation characteristics of an emitter embedded in such epsilon-and-mu-near-zero media in bounded environments. Using such media, one might in principle 'open up' and 'stretch' the space, and have regions behaving electromagnetically as 'single points' despite being electrically large. We suggest a possible design for implementation of such structures using a single dielectric rod inserted in a waveguide operating near its cutoff frequency, providing the possibility of having electrically large 'empty' volumes to behave as epsilon-and-mu-near-zero media.
近年来，超材料的概念为非常规的光物质相互作用提供了平台。在这里，我们探讨了“静态光学”的概念，其中电和磁是解耦的，而场是时变的。当相对有效介电常数和磁导率在给定的工作频率下都接近零时，就会发生这种情况。我们从理论上研究了在有界情况下的一些由此产生的波特征，例如在这种介电常数和磁导率接近零的介质中嵌入发射器的不寻常辐射特性。在这样的介质中，人们原则上可以“打开”和“拉伸”空间，并使区域在电磁上表现为“单点”，尽管在电学上很大。我们建议使用单个介电棒插入波导中在其截止频率附近运行，以实现这种结构的可能设计，从而提供具有大的电学“空”体积的可能性表现为介电常数和磁导率接近零的介质。
