Electromagnetic modes in cavities made of negative-index metamaterials

Abstract

We discuss electromagnetic modes in cavities formed by metamaterials with negative refraction and demonstrate that the straightforward approach to substitute negative values of the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability leads to quasi-bound states with a negative quality factor. To ensure positive quality factors and a consistent physical interpretation of the quasi-bound states it is essential to include the frequency dispersion of the permittivity and the permeability, as required by positive field energy and causality. The basic mode equation and the boundary conditions including linear frequency dispersion are derived. As an example we consider a disk-like cavity with deformed cross sectional shape. The transition from the unphysical nondispersive case with negative quality factors to the dispersive case with positive quality factors is demonstrated numerically and in an analytical perturbative treatment.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Magnifying superlens in the visible frequency range
• Combining directional light output and ultralow loss in deformed microdisks
• Superscatterer: Enhancement of scattering with complementary media
• Chaotic Microcavity Laser with Low threshold and Unidirectional Output
• On the electromagnetic properties of active media
• Causality-based criteria for a negative refractive index must be used with care
• Goos-Haenchen shift and localization of optical modes in deformed microcavities
• Correcting ray optics at curved dielectric microresonator interfaces: Phase-space unification of Fresnel filtering and the Goos-Haenchen shift
• Ray-wave correspondence in limacon-shaped semiconductor microcavities

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Antisymmetric PT-photonic structures with balanced positive and negative index materials
• Nonorthogonal pairs of copropagating optical modes in deformed microdisk cavities