Abstract

Artificial materials with sub-wavelength plasmonic features (metamaterials) are known to exhibit very unusual optical properties, which can be used for optical filtering, fabricating super-lenses or hyper-lenses, optical cloaking and other applications. During the last years, liquid crystals (ordered fluids) have found increasing interest in the field of metamaterials research. They can be used to either promote the spatial arrangement of the structural units of a metamaterial through self-organization or to equip the structure with tunable optical properties. In the latter case, the liquid crystal (LC) serves as a dielectric component, in which case the effective permittivity can be controlled by adjusting the temperature, applying quasi-static fields or exposing the metamaterial to electromagnetic radiation [1].

© 2015 IEEE