Longitudinal electromagnetic waves with extremely short wavelength

Abstract

Electromagnetic waves in vacuum and most materials have transverse polarization. Longitudinal electromagnetic waves with electric field parallel to wave vector are very rare and appear under special conditions in a limited class of media, for example in plasma. In this work, we study the dispersion properties of an easy-to-manufacture metamaterial consisting of two three-dimensional cubic lattices of connected metallic wires inserted one into another, also known as an interlaced wire medium. It is shown that the metamaterial supports longitudinal waves at extremely wide frequency band from very low frequencies up to the Bragg resonances of the structure. The waves feature unprecedentedly short wavelengths comparable to the period of the material. The revealed effects highlight spatially dispersive response of interlaced wire medium and provide a route toward generating electromagnetic fields with strong spatial variation.

References in corpus (2)

• Strong spatial dispersion in wire media in the very large wavelength limit
• Light tunneling anomaly in interlaced metallic wire meshes

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Extreme Spatial Dispersion in Nonlocally-Resonant Elastic Metamaterials
• 3-D Metamaterials: Trends on Applied Designs, Computational Methods and Fabrication Techniques
• Unconventional bound states in the continuum from metamaterial induced electron-acoustic plasma waves
• Interlaced wire medium with quasicrystal lattice
• Experimental observation of anomalous optical transmission in interlaced metallic wire meshes
• Controlling the dispersion of longitudinal waves via the affine deformation of the interlaced wire medium
• Dispersion Characteristics of a Glide-Symmetric Square Patch Metamaterial with Giant Anisotropy