Symmetry breaking in metallic cut wire pairs metamaterials for negative refractive index

Metamaterials made of exclusively metallic cut wire pairs have been experimentally demonstrated to exhibit a negative refractive index at optical frequencies. However, other related works have not shown a negative index. In this paper, we propose an easy way to manipulate the magnetic and electric resonances of these metamaterials to produce a negative index. We show that judiciously breaking the symmetry of the structure allows tuning of both resonances leading to an overlapping between the negative permeability and negative permittivity regions. Numerical and experimental parametric studies of several cut wire pairs metamaterials are presented to validate our method at microwave frequencies.