Optical design is largely a matter of choosing the right material for the job and then optimizing its geometry—say, a glass lens to form images, a metal cage to screen sensitive electronics, or a polymer film to reduce surface reflections. But the range of electromagnetic properties available to optical engineers from materials found in nature falls far short of what is theoretically possible.
In 1999 John Pendry and colleagues from Imperial College London dramatically extended the palette of realizable electromagnetic properties by proposing a variety of artificial structures—metamaterials—whose response to radiation could be custom-designed. 1 Although the field of artificial materials dates back to the 1940s, it took advances in computation and fabrication technology made in the 1990s, along with a surge of interest in negative refraction, to set the stage for engineering composite materials whose effective magnetic permeability tensor μ and electric permittivity tensor ε could be tailored.
Essentially...
