Diffraction-free optical beam propagation with near-zero phase variation in extremely anisotropic metamaterials

Abstract

Extremely anisotropic metal-dielectric multilayer metamaterials are designed to have the effective permittivity tensor of a transverse component (parallel to the interfaces of the multilayer) with zero real part and a longitudinal component (normal to the interfaces of the multilayer) with ultra-large imaginary part at the same wavelength, including the optical nonlocality analysis based on the transfer-matrix method. The diffraction-free deep-subwavelength optical beam propagation with near-zero phase variation in the designed multilayer stack due to the near-flat iso-frequency contour is demonstrated and analyzed, including the effects of the multilayer period and the material loss.

17 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Broadband super-Planckian thermal emission from hyperbolic metamaterials
• Non-local effects in effective medium response of nano-layered meta-materials
• Three-dimensional metamaterials with an ultra-high effective refractive index over broad bandwidth
• From surface to volume plasmons in hyperbolic metamaterials: General existence conditions for bulk high-k waves in metal-dielectric and graphene-dielectric multilayers