Space-Time Metamaterials

Abstract

Despite more than a decade of active research, the fundamental problem of material loss remains a major obstacle in fulfilling the promise of the recently emerged fields of metamaterials and plasmonics to bring in revolutionary practical applications. In the present work, we demonstrate that the problem of strong material absorption that is inherent to plasmonic systems and metamaterials based on plasmonic components, can be addressed by utilizing the time dimension. By matching the pulse profile to the actual response of a lossy metamaterial, this approach allows to offset the effect of the material absorption. The existence of the corresponding solution relies on the fundamental property of causality, that relates the absorption in the medium to the variations in the frequency-dependent time delay introduced by the material, via the Kramers-Kronig relations. We demonstrate that the proposed space-time approach can be applied to a broad range of metamaterial-based and plasmonic systems, from hyperbolic media to metal optics and new plasmonic materials.