Abstract

The extraordinary optical behaviour of artificial metamaterials is dictated by the resonant nature of their constitutive elements, which are nanostructured plasmonic particles. According to their configuration and complexity, metamaterials exhibit tailored optical effects like negative refraction, asymmetric transmission and optical activity. In particular, recent developments in nanostructure technology enabled fabrication of metamaterials composed of complex three-dimensional constitutive elements [1]. This significant progress demands a revision of the standard experimental techniques for the characterization of the optical properties of metamaterials. To tackle this issue we recently demonstrated an experimental method for the direct quantification of the dispersion relation of metamaterials [2]. Our setup is based on white-light spectral interferometry and facilitates measurements of complex transmission and reflection coefficients for wavelengths from 650 nm to 1700 nm. The dispersion relation of a metamaterial, thereby, can be readily calculated from the complex coefficients, using the common retrieval algorithm.

© 2011 IEEE