Optical Properties of Quartic Metamaterials

Maxim Durach, Georgia Southern University

Usage Details

This project is part of the Blue Waters Student Internship Program. We propose to expand the realm of currently considered metamaterials to the most general class, which we have recently introduced—the quartic media. Quartic metamaterials can be characterized by 36 complex effective parameters, which enter 3x3 tensors of dielectric permittivity ε, magnetic permeability μ and magnetoelectric couplings. As we have recently demonstrated, in such materials k-surfaces (also known as iso-frequency surfaces) are quartic surfaces, described by 4th order polynomials in k-vector components. This is in contrast to the currently considered metamaterials whose k-surfaces are quadratic, i.e. spheres, ellipsoids, hyperboloids (e.g. hyperbolic metamaterials). Quartic metamaterials include all the non-reciprocal optical media, complex bi-anisotropic and chiral media; they also serve as a generalization of hyperbolic materials and feature up to 4 cones in the high-k limit (only 2 cones in hyperbolic media). During this Internship we will develop a general theory of electromagnetic waves in quartic metamaterials such that starting from arbitrary desired electromagnetic fields we will be able to obtain the effective medium parameters of the quartic metamaterial supporting these fields. We will conduct extensive numerical studies of possible quartic metamaterials.