Metamaterials have paved the way to unprecedented control of the electromagnetic field1,2. The conjunction with space coordinate transformation has led to a novel "relativity inspired" approach for the control of light propagation. "Invisibility cloak" is the most fascinating proposed devices3,4. However, the realized structures up to now used a graded "metamagnetic" so as to achieve the cloaking function11. Artificial magnetism is however still very challenging to obtain in optics despite the currently promising building blocks13-17, not suited for optical cloaking. We report here the first experimental demonstration of non-magnetic cloak at microwave frequencies by direct mapping of the magnetic field together with the first experimental characterization of a cloak in free space configuration. The diameter of the concealed region is as big as 4.4 in wavelength units, the biggest reported experimentally so far. The principle can be scaled down to optical domain while keeping the compatibility with current nanofabrication technologies.
Artificially structured metamaterials have enabled unprecedented flexibility in manipulating electromagnetic waves and producing new functionalities, including the cloak of invisibility based on coordinate transformation. Here we present the design of a non-magnetic cloak operating at optical frequencies. The principle and structure of the proposed cylindrical cloak are analyzed, and the general recipe for the implementation of such a device is provided. The cloaking performance is verified using full-wave finite-element simulations.
We demonstrate that metamaterial devices requiring anisotropic dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability may be emulated by specially designed tapered waveguides. This approach leads to low-loss, broadband performance. Based on this technique, we demonstrate broadband electromagnetic cloaking in the visible frequency range on a scale ~100 times larger than the wavelength.
Transformation optics (TO) is a powerful tool for the design of artiffcial materials with unprecedented optical properties. Here, we propose the approximation of TO structures of arbitrary shape by faceting, in which curved surfaces are approximated by at metamaterial layers that can be implemented by standard fabrication and stacking techniques. We illustrate the approximation approach for the specific example of a cylindrical invisibility cloak. First, we introduce a numerical method for the design of cloaks with arbitrary boundary shapes, and apply it to faceted shapes. Subsequently, we red…
We propose a new class of resonant electromagnetic structures, and study their response to free-space illumination. The structures consist of partial cylindrical shells that have cloaking material properties proposed by Pendry et al. These metamaterial shells have apertures that allow the propagation of incident irradiation into an interior resonant cavity. We use full wave time-harmonic analysis to study the field distribution inside the cavity, and show that an analogue of Whispering Gallery Modes (WGMs) can be efficiently excited via free-space illumination.
We show that a metamaterial slab with arbitrary values of epsilon and mu behaves as a cloak at a finite frequency for a small object located sufficiently close to it due to the suppression of the object's optical excitations by enhanced reflections. Reflections due to propagating components can partially suppress the excitation while evanescent components can cloak the object completely. In particular, a Veselago slab with epsilon = mu = -1 + i delta, as well as a class of anisotropic negative refractive index slabs, can completely cloak the small object placed within a finite distance from th…
In this paper, we present the design of cylindrical and spherical electromagnetic cloaks working at visible frequencies. The cloak design is based on the employment of layered structures consisting of alternating plasmonic and non-plasmonic materials and exhibiting the collective behavior of an effective epsilon-near-zero material at optical frequencies. The design of a cylindrical cloak to hide cylindrical objects is firstly presented. Two alternative layouts are proposed and both magnetic and non-magnetic objects are considered. Then, the design of spherical cloaks is also presented. The ful…
In this contribution, we present the design of cylindrical electromagnetic cloaks working at optical frequencies, making use of layered structures of plasmonic and non-plasmonic materials. The simulated results confirm the validity of the proposed approach and show a rather broad-band behavior of the cloaking device.
We introduce the concept and practical design of broadband, ultrathin cloaks based on non-Foster, negatively capacitive metasurfaces. By using properly tailored, active frequency-selective screens conformal to an object, within the realm of practical realization, is shown to enable drastically reduced scattering over a wide frequency range in the microwave regime, orders of magnitude broader than any available passive cloaking technology. The proposed active cloak may impact not only invisibility and camouflaging, but also practical antenna and sensing applications.
Concealing objects by making them invisible to an external electromagnetic probe is coined by the term cloaking. Cloaking devices, having numerous potential applications, are still face challenges in realization, especially in the visible spectral range. In particular, inherent losses and extreme parameters of metamaterials required for the cloak implementation are the limiting factors. Here, we numerically demonstrate nearly perfect suppression of scattering from arbitrary shaped objects in spatially dispersive metamaterial acting as an alignment-free concealing cover. We consider a realizati…
Very recently Farhat et al. [1] have suggested that arrays of invisibility cloaks may find important applications in low-interference communication, noninvasive probing, sensing and communication networks, etc. We report on the first experimental realization of such an array of broadband invisibility cloaks, which operates in the visible frequency range. Wavelength and angular dependencies of the cloak array performance have been studied.
Recently, invisible cloaks have attracted much attention due to their exciting property of invisibility, which are based on a solid theory of transformation optics and quasi-conformal mapping. Two kinds of cloaks have been proposed: free-space cloaks, which can render objects in free space invisible to incident radiation, and carpet cloaks (or ground cloaks), which can hide objects under the conducting ground. The first free-space and carpet cloaks were realized in the microwave frequencies using metamaterials. The free-space cloak was composed of resonant metamaterials, and hence had restrict…
We propose a way of implementing an event cloaking device without the use of metamaterials. Rather than slowing down and speeding up light, we manipulate an obscurity gap by diverting the light through paths of appropriate length with an arrangement of switchable transreflective mirrors.
Invisibility cloaking not only catches the human imagination, but also promises fascinating applications in optics and photonics. By manipulating electromagnetic waves with metamaterials, researchers have been able to realize electromagnetic cloaking in the microwave, terahertz and optical regimes. Nevertheless, the complex design and fabrication process, narrow bandwidth, and high intrinsic losses in the metamaterial-based cloaks have imposed intractable limitations on their realistic applications. Seeking new approaches to overcome these perceived disadvantages is in progress. Here by using …
In the past years quasi-conformal mapping has been typically used to design broadband electromagnetic cloaks. However, this technique has some inherit practical limitations such as the lateral beam shift, rendering the device visible or difficult to hide a large object. In this work we circumvent these issues by using strict conformal mapping to build the first isotropic cloak. Microwave near-field measurement shows that our device (with dielectric constant larger than unity everywhere) has a very good cloaking performance and a broad frequency response. The present dielectric approach could b…
Based on transformation optics theory, we present a new carpet device that can be used to thermally protect a region from the invasion of external heat flux. The designed device is termed 'thermal carpet', which provides considerable cloaking effect. The cloaking performance for heat flux originating from different directions are analyzed. Unlike most thermal cloak designs reported in the literature, the material parameters are constant with position throughout the cloak, indicating that only one type of metamaterial composite to fabricate such a carpet is required.
We propose multilayer cylindrical invisibility cloaks that are optimized for oblique incidences through combination of analytic formalism of scattering and genetic optimization. We show that by using only four layers of homogeneous and anisotropic metamaterials without large values of constitutive parameters, the scattering for oblique incidences can be reduced by two orders. Although the optimization is done at a single incident angle, the cloak provides reduced scattering over a large range of incident angles.
Electromagnetic metamaterials provide unprecedented freedom and flexibility to introduce new devices, which control electromagnetic wave propagation in very unusual ways. Very recently theoretical design of an "invisibility cloak" has been suggested, which has been realized at microwave frequencies in a two-dimensional cylindrical geometry. In this communication we report on the experimental realization of the dielectric permittivity distribution required for non-magnetic cloaking in the visible frequency range.
Invisibility or cloaking has captured human's imagination for many years. With the recent advancement of metamaterials, several theoretical proposals show cloaking of objects is possible, however, so far there is a lack of an experimental demonstration at optical frequencies. Here, we report the first experimental realization of a dielectric optical cloak. The cloak is designed using quasi-conformal mapping to conceal an object that is placed under a curved reflecting surface which imitates the reflection of a flat surface. Our cloak consists only of isotropic dielectric materials which enable…
In this work, we present a numerical method that remedies the instabilities of the conventional FDTD approach for solving Maxwell's equations in a space-time dependent magneto-electric medium with direct application to the simulation of the recently proposed spacetime cloak. We utilize a dual grid FDTD method overlapped to the time domain to provide a stable approach for the simulation of magneto-electric medium with time and space varying permittivity, permeability and coupling coefficient. The developed method can be applied to explore other new physical possibilities offered by spacetime cl…
Coordinate-transformation cloaking is based on the design of a metamaterial shell made of an anisotropic, spatially inhomogeneous "transformation medium" that allows rerouting the impinging wave around a given region of space. In its original version, it is generally believed that, in the ideal limit, the radiation cannot penetrate the cloaking shell (from outside to inside, and viceversa). However, it was recently shown by Chen et al. that electromagnetic fields may actually penetrate the cloaked region, provided that this region contains double-negative transformation media which, via proper…
Transformation optics (TO) has recently become a useful methodology in the design of unusual optical devices, such as novel metamaterial lenses and invisibility cloaks. Very recently Danner et al. [1] have suggested theoretical extension of this approach to birefrigent TO devices, which perform useful and different functions for mutually orthogonal polarization states of light. Theoretical designs which operate as invisibility cloak for one polarization while behaving as a Luneburg lens for another orthogonal polarization have been suggested. Here we report the first experimental realization o…
Electromagnetic invisibility cloak requires material with anisotropic distribution of the constitutive parameters deduced from a geometrical transformation as first proposed by Pendry et al. [Science 312, 1780 (2006)]. In this paper, we proposed a useful method to realize the required radius-dependent, anisotropic material parameters and to construct an electromagnetic cloak through concentric layered structure of thin, alternating layers of homogeneous isotropic materials. With proper design of the permittivity or the thickness ratio of the alternating layers, we demonstrated the low-reflecti…
We show that it is possible to design an invisible wavelength-sized metal-dielectric metamaterial object without evoking cloaking. Our approach is an extension of the neutral inclusion concept by Zhou and Hu [Phys.Rev.E 74, 026607 (2006)] to Mie scatterers. We demonstrate that an increase of metal fraction in the metamaterial leads to a transition from dielectric-like to metal-like scattering, which proceeds through invisibility or optical neutrality of the scatterer. Formally this is due to cancellation of multiple scattering orders, similarly to plasmonic cloaking introduced by Alu and Enghe…
Invisible cloaking is one of major outcomes of the metamaterial research, but the practical potential, in particular for high frequencies (e.g., microwave to visible light), is fatally challenged by the complex material properties they usually demand. On the other hand, it will be advantageous and also technologically instrumental to design cloaking devices for applications at low frequencies where electromagnetic components are favorably uncoupled. In this work, we vastly develop the bilayer approach to create a three-dimensional magnetic cloak able to work in both static and dynamic fields. …
We demonstrate, for the first time, an all-dielectric metamaterial resonator in the mid-wave infrared based on high-index tellurium cubic inclusions. Dielectric resonators are desirable compared to conventional metallo-dielectric metamaterials at optical frequencies as they are largely angular invariant, free of ohmic loss, and easily integrated into three-dimensional volumes. With these low-loss, isotropic elements, disruptive optical metamaterial designs, such as wide-angle lenses and cloaks, can be more easily realized.
Recent research has uncovered a remarkable ability to manipulate and control electromagnetic fields to produce effects such as perfect imaging and spatial cloaking. To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of refraction is manipulated to flow light from a probe around an object in such a way that a "hole" in space is created, and it remains hidden. Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking was proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time to produce a "time hole" in the probe beam …
The invisibility cloak has been a long-standing dream for many researchers over the decades. By transforming space and light propagation, a three-dimensional (3D) object can be perceived as having reduced number of dimensions, in the form of points, lines, and thin sheets, making it "undetectable" judging from scattered field. Although a variety of cloaking devices have been reported at microwave and optical frequencies, the Terahertz (THz) domain remains unexplored. Moreover, it should be noted that all the previous experimental demonstrations are performed in a two-dimensional (2D) waveguide…
Coordinate-transformation approaches to invisibility cloaking rely on the design of an anisotropic, spatially inhomogeneous "transformation medium" capable of suitably re-routing the energy flux around the region to conceal without causing any scattering in the exterior region. It is well known that the inherently magnetic properties of such medium limit the high-frequency scaling of practical "metamaterial" implementations based on subwavelength inclusions (e.g., split-ring resonators). Thus, for the optical range, non-magnetic implementations, based on approximate reductions of the constitut…
Photonic metamaterials are man-made structures composed of tailored micro- or nanostructured metallo-dielectric sub-wavelength building blocks that are densely packed into an effective material. This deceptively simple, yet powerful, truly revolutionary concept allows for achieving novel, unusual, and sometimes even unheard-of optical properties, such as magnetism at optical frequencies, negative refractive indices, large positive refractive indices, zero reflection via impedance matching, perfect absorption, giant circular dichroism, or enhanced nonlinear optical properties. Possible applicat…
In this work, we discuss theoretical findings on the common feature describing nonradiating sources, based on equivalent sources from which it is possible to derive cloaking devices and anapole mode conditions. Starting from the differential form of Maxwell's Equations expressed in terms of equivalent electromagnetic sources, we derive two unique compact conditions. By specifying the nature of these passively induced or actively impressed current density sources in certain volumes and (or) predefined surfaces, we derive theoretical results consistently with the literature about nonradiating pa…
In past years, triggered by their successful realizations in electromagnetics, invisible cloaks have experienced rapid development and have been widely pursued in many different fields, though so far only for a single physical system. In this letter we made an unprecedented experimental attempt to show a multidisciplinary framework designed on the basis of two different physical equations. The proposed structure has the exceptional capability to simultaneously control two different physical phenomena according to the predetermined evolution scenarios. As a proof of concept, we implemented an e…
Carpet or ground-plane invisibility cloaks hide an object in reflection and inhibit transmission by construction. This concept has significantly reduced the otherwise demanding material requirements and has hence enabled various experimental demonstrations. In contrast, free-space invisibility cloaks should work in both reflection and transmission. The fabrication of omnidirectional three-dimensional free-space cloaks still poses significant challenges. Recently, the idea of the carpet cloak has been carried over to experiments on unidirectional free-space invisibility cloaks that only work pe…
Near-infrared epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterial slabs based on silver-germanium (Ag-Ge) multilayers are experimentally demonstrated. Transmission, reflection and absorption spectra are characterized and used to determine the complex refractive indices and the effective permittivities of the ENZ metamaterial slabs, which match the results obtained from both the numerical simulations and the optical nonlocalities analysis. A rapid post-annealing process is used to reduce the collision frequency of silver and therefore decrease the optical absorption loss of multilayer metamaterial slabs. Furt…
Optical metamaterials (OMs) at visible wavelengths have been extensively developed. OMs reported recently are all composed of periodic structure, and fabricated by top-down approaches. Here demonstrated are the colored visible light frequency metamaterials composed of double layer array disordered and geometrical variational dendritic cells as well as fabricated by a novel bottom-up approach. The experiment demonstrates that the OMs composed of random silver dendritic cells which caused the appearance of multiple transmission passbands at red and yellow light frequencies. Moreover, the slab fo…
Metamaterials offer unprecedented flexibility for manipulating the optical properties of matter, including the ability to access negative index, ultra-high index and chiral optical properties. Recently, metamaterials with near-zero refractive index have drawn much attention. Light inside such materials experiences no spatial phase change and extremely large phase velocity, properties that can be applied for realizing directional emission, tunneling waveguides, large area single mode devices, and electromagnetic cloaks. However, at optical frequencies previously demonstrated zero- or negative-r…
A robust wedge setup is proposed to unambiguously demonstrate negative refraction for negative index metamaterials. We applied our setup to several optical metamaterials from the literature and distinctly observed the phenomena of negative refraction. This further consolidates the reported negative-index property. It is found there generally exists a lateral shift for the outgoing beam through the wedge. We derived a simple expression for calculating this beam shift and interestingly, it provides us a strategy to quantitatively estimate the loss of the wedge material (Im[n]). Addition- ally, w…
Metamaterials are being used to model various exotic "optical spaces" for such applications as novel lenses and cloaking. While most effort is directed towards engineering of continuously changing dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability tensors, an alternative approach may be based on lattices of metamaterial waveguides. Here we demonstrate the power of the latter technique by presenting metamaterial lattice models of various 4D spaces.
The key challenge in current research into electromagnetic cloaking is to achieve invisibility over an extended bandwidth. There has been significant progress towards this using the idea of cloaking by sweeping under the carpet of Li and Pendry, with dielectric structures superposed on a mirror. Here, we show that we can harness surface plasmon polaritons at a metal surface structured with a dielectric material to obtain a unique control of their propagation. We exploit this to control plasmonic coupling and demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally cloaking over an unprecedented bandw…
A well-known principle in optical physics states that power can never be exchanged between two light waves propagating inside a homogeneous medium when the medium response is strictly linear. Power exchange between light waves usually occurs with the aid of nonlinearity. A typical example is nonlinear optical parametric amplification where net energy can flow from a high-frequency (high-energy) light wave (pump) to a lower-frequency signal wave, leading to amplification of the signal wave. Here, we show that this limitation of ordinary media can be overcome using suitably engineered metamateri…
Coordinate transformations are a versatile tool to mould the flow of light, enabling a host of astonishing phenomena such as optical cloaking with metamaterials. Moving away from the usual restriction that links isotropic materials with conformal transformations, we show how non-conformal distortions of optical space are intimately connected to the complex refractive index distribution of an isotropic non-Hermitian medium. Remarkably, this insight can be used to circumvent the material requirement of working with refractive indices below unity, which limits the applications of transformation o…
The invisibility cloak has been a long-standing dream for many researchers over the decades. The introduction of transformational optics has revitalized this field by providing a general method to design material distributions to hide the subject from detection. By transforming space and light propagation, a three-dimensional (3D) object is perceived as having a reduced number of dimensions, in the form of points, lines, and thin sheets, making it "undetectable" judging from the scattered field. Although a variety of cloaking devices have been reported at microwave and optical frequencies, the…
Transformational optics allow for a markedly enhanced control of the electromagnetic wave trajectories within metamaterials with interesting applications ranging from perfect lenses to invisibility cloaks, carpets, concentrators and rotators. Here, we present a review of curved anisotropic heterogeneous meta-surfaces designed using the tool of transformational plasmonics, in order to achieve a similar control for surface plasmon polaritons in cylindrical and conical carpets, as well as cylindrical cloaks, concentrators and rotators of a non-convex cross-section. Finally, we provide an asymptot…
Cobalt nanoparticle-based ferrofluid in the presence of external magnetic field forms a self-assembled hyperbolic metamaterial. Wave equation describing propagation of extraordinary light inside the ferrofluid exhibits 2+1 dimensional Lorentz symmetry. The role of time in the corresponding effective 3D Minkowski spacetime is played by the spatial coordinate directed along the periodic nanoparticle chains aligned by the magnetic field. Here we present a microscopic study of point, linear, planar and volume defects of the nanoparticle chain structure and demonstrate that they may exhibit strong …
Optical metamaterials have the potential to control the flow of light at will which may lead to spectacular applications as the perfect lens or the cloaking device. Both of these optical elements require invariant effective material properties (permittivity, permeability) for all spatial frequencies involved in the imaging process. However, it turned out that due to the mesoscopic nature of current metamaterials spatial dispersion prevents to meet this requirement; rendering them far away from being applicable for the purpose of imaging. A solution to this problem is not straightforwardly at h…
We present the design, numerical simulations and experimental measurements of THz metamaterial absorbers with a broad and flat absorption top both for transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarizations over a wide incidence angle range. The metamaterial absorber unit cell consists of two sets of structures resonating at different but close frequencies. The overall absorption spectrum is the superposition of individual components and becomes flat at the top over a significant bandwidth. The experimental results are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.
The ability to control resonant properties of individual metamolecule in a metamaterial structure will offer an ultimate freedom for dynamically shaping wavefronts of electromagnetic radiation for applications such as variable aberration corrected planar lenses, dynamic holograms and spatial intensity and phase modulators. Here we report the first demonstration of a metamaterial where resonant properties of every individual metamolecule can be continuously controlled at will thus offering an ultimate freedom in achieving a dynamic control of electromagnetic wavefront of microwave radiation. We…
Extraordinary light rays propagating inside a hyperbolic metamaterial look similar to particle world lines in a 2+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime [1]. Magnetic nanoparticles in a ferrofluid are known to form nanocolumns aligned along the magnetic field, so that a hyperbolic metamaterial may be formed at large enough nanoparticle concentration nH. Here we investigate optical properties of such a metamaterial just below nH. While on average such a metamaterial is elliptical, thermal fluctuations of nanoparticle concentration lead to transient formation of hyperbolic regions (3D Minkowski space…
In this work, we treat the rotation of the optical axis as a new degree of freedom and theoretically propose a tilted linear-crossing metamaterials (TLCMM). Specifically, the conical dispersions of the NLCMM and TLCMM have the same shapes as type-I and type-II Dirac cones, respectively, in condensed matter physics. Upon rotating the optical axis angle such that it is equal to the cone angle, we find that this special TLCMM has the shape of a type-III Dirac cone. This critical TLCMM can have many unique properties and is of a fundamentally different nature than neighboring phases. When EM waves…
A recent proposal that the metamaterial approach to dielectric response engineering may increase the critical temperature of a composite superconductor-dielectric metamaterial has been tested in experiments with compressed mixtures of tin and barium titanate nanoparticles of varying composition. An increase of the critical temperature of the order of 0.15 K compared to bulk tin has been observed for 40% volume fraction of barium titanate nanoparticles. Similar results were also obtained with compressed mixtures of tin and strontium titanate nanoparticles.
In this paper, we propose a novel electromagnetic (EM) cloaking structure that consists of two annular layers between three spherical shells and model its performance numerically and theoretically by using a Global and Local EM field (GL) method. The two annular layers contain distinct cloaking materials: the outer layer provides invisibility; the inner layer is fully absorbing. The cloaking materials are weakly degenerative. The wavefield from an EM source located outside the cloak propagates as in free space outside the outer shell, never be disturbed by the cloak and does not penetrate into…
Transformation optics gives rise to numerous unusual optical devices, such as novel metamaterial lenses and invisibility cloaks. Very recently Mattheakis et al. have suggested theoretical design of an optical waveguide based on a network of Luneburg lenses, which may be useful in sensing and nonlinear optics applications. Here we report the first experimental realization of such Luneburg waveguides. We have studied wavelength and polarization dependent performance of the waveguides.
In this paper, we address non-radiating and cloaking problems exploiting the surface equivalence principle, by imposing at any arbitrary boundary the control of the admittance discontinuity between the overall object (with or without cloak) and the background. After a rigorous demonstration, we apply this model to a non-radiating problem, appealing for anapole modes and metamolecules modeling, and to a cloaking problem, appealing for non-Foster metasurface design. A straightforward analytical condition is obtained for controlling the scattering of a dielectric object over a surface boundary of…
Metamaterials based on effective media have achieved a lot of unusual physics (e.g. negative refraction and invisibility cloaking) owing to their abilities to tailor the effective medium parameters that do not exist in nature. Recently, coding metamaterials have been suggested to control electromagnetic waves by designing the coding sequences of digital elements '0' and '1', which possess opposite phase responses. Here, we propose the concept of anisotropic coding metamaterial at terahertz frequencies, in which coding behaviors in different directions are dependent on the polarization status o…
The ability to control and direct acoustic energy is essential for many engineering applications such as vibration and noise control, invisibility cloaking, acoustic sensing, energy harvesting, and phononic switching and rectification. The realization of acoustic regulators requires overcoming fundamental challenges inherent to the time-reversal nature of wave equations. Typically, this is achieved by utilizing either a parameter that is odd-symmetric under time-reversal or by introducing passive nonlinearities. The former approach is power consuming while the latter has two major deficiencies…
Tuning the macroscopic dielectric response on demand holds potential for actively tunable metaphotonics and optical devices. In recent years, graphene has been extensively investigated as a tunable element in nanophotonics. Significant theoretical work has been devoted on the tuning the hyperbolic properties of graphene/dielectric heterostructures, however, until now, such a motif has not been demonstrated experimentally. Here we focus on a graphene/polaritonic dielectric metamaterial, with strong optical resonances arising from the polar response of the dielectric, which are, in general, diff…
The interaction of free electrons with electromagnetic excitation is the fundamental mechanism responsible for ultra-strong confinement of light that, in turn, enables biosensing, near-field microscopy, optical cloaking, sub-wavelength focusing, and super-resolution imaging. These unique phenomena and functionalities critically rely on the negative permittivity of optical elements resulting from the free electrons. As result, progress in nanophotonics and nano-optics is often related to the development of new negative permittivity (plasmonic) media at the optical frequency of interest. Here we…