New composite gyrotropic double-negative metamaterial

Abstract

This work is the continuation of our study started in Tralle et al. (J Appl Phys 115:233509, 2014). In it, we examined the possibility of fabricating the metamaterial in a relatively simple way. Our idea was to use the three-component mixture of ingredients, where one of them is responsible for the negative permeability of hypothetical metamaterial, while the other two cause the negative value of effective permittivity . In our previous work (Tralle et al. in J Appl Phys 115:233509, 2014), we considered HgCdTe semiconductor compound as one of the ingredients of the mixture, where the remaining components were the silver particles and ferromagnetic nanoparticles. As fabrication of the HgCdTe is related to using mercury which is very poisoning, we tried to exclude this material. In this work, we proved by numerical simulations the possibility of substituting mercury cadmium telluride by PbSnTe. Additionally, taking into account that silver is relatively expensive material, we have also used Cu and Al particles as the cheaper substitute of it. We have shown by computer simulations that by the proper fitting of the parameters, e.g., the radius of nanoparticles, their magnetic moments, the relative concentration of ingredients, etc., it is possible to obtain the double-negative metamaterial that is with negative refraction index in a relatively broad range of temperatures and magnetic fields. The last seems to be very promising in terms of practical applications of metamaterials.