In recent years a very exciting and intense activity has been devoted to the understanding and construction of materials that enjoy exotic optical properties, such as a negative refractive index. Motivated by these experimental and theoretical developments, we use the string-inspired idea of holography to study the electromagnetic response of a certain class of media: strongly coupled relativistic systems that admit a dual gravitational description. Our results indicate that this type of media generally have a negative refractive index. Moreover we observe that a negative refractive index could be a common feature of relativistic hydrodynamic systems at low frequencies.
Which systems are ideal to obtain negative refraction with no absorption? Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is a method to suppress absorption and make a material transparent to a field of a given frequency. Such a system has been discussed in [1]; however the main limitations for negative refraction introduced are the necessity of resonant electric and magnetic dipole transitions, and the necessity of very dense media. We suggest using frequency translators in a composite system that would provide negative refraction for a range of optical frequencies while attempting to overcome the limitations discussed above. In the process of using frequency translators, we also find composite systems that can be used for refractive index enhancement.
We consider the extension of optical meta-materials to matter waves. We show that the generic property of pulsed comoving magnetic fields allows us to fashion the wave-number dependence of the atomic phase shift. It can be used to produce a transient negative group velocity of an atomic wave packet, which results into a negative refraction of the matter wave. Application to slow metastable argon atoms Ar*(3P2) shows that the device is able to operate either as an efficient beam splitter or an atomic meta-lens. Implications of meta-media in atom optics are considered.
We study the phenomenon of additional light waves (ALWs), observed in crystal optics: two or more electromagnetic waves with the same polarization, but different refractive index, propagate simultaneously in a isotropic medium. We show that ALWs are common in relativistic hydrodynamics, and in particular in strongly coupled systems that admit a dual gravitational description, where the ALWs are dual to quasi normal modes in the AdS gravity. We study both the transverse and the longitudinal light wave propagation. In the longitudinal channel we find a transition between regimes with different number of excitonic resonances which resembles the transition to standard optics observed in crystals.
We demonstrate numerically and experimentally a conjugated gammadion chiral metamaterial that uniaxially exhibits huge optical activity and circular dichroism, and gives a negative refractive index. This chiral design provides smaller unit cell size and larger chirality compared with other published planar designs. Experiments are performed at GHz frequencies (around 6GHz) and in good agreement with the numerical simulations.
Recently it has been proposed that a planar slab of material, for which both the permittivity and permeability have the values of -1, could bring not only the propagating fields associated with a source to a focus, but could also refocus the nonpropagating near-fields, thereby achieving a subdiffraction image. In this work we discuss the sensitivity of the subwavelength focus to various slab parameters, pointing out the connection to slab plasmon modes. We also note and resolve a paradox associated with the perfect imaging of a point source. We conclude that subwavelength resolution is achievable with available technology, but only by implementation of a critical set of design parameters.