| Negative-index materials have attracted much attention because of their many unconventional optical properties such as negative refractive angle, phase back propagation, reversed Doppler effect and reversed Cherenkov radiation. Recently, much progress has been made in this research area such as demonstrations of negative permeability "metamaterials" in the rf and microwave regimes, and the predictions and demonstrations (largely in the rf) of negative index materials (and predictions of diffraction-less "perfect" imaging in these materials). In this dissertation, fabrication and characterization of several novel metal-based metamaterial that show unconventional IR/optical properties are discussed.; While metals provide a negative permittivity at frequencies below the plasma frequency, naturally occurring materials with negative permeability at optical frequencies are not available. Composite electromagnetic materials with resonant structures with sizes much less than the wavelength can act as an effective homogeneous media with a negative permeability. One widely used structure to achieve negative permeability in rf is the so called "split ring resonator" (SRR) proposed by Pendry. By using SRR, the highest resonant frequency that has been obtained is around 1 THz. The complexity of SRR makes it difficult to be further scaled down to reach magnetic resonance at infrared frequencies, even with electron beam lithography. As part of this dissertation, the fabrication, characterization and modeling of arrays of a new nanostructure design with resonances in the mid-IR region and properties that demonstrate strong magnetic activity indicative of negative permeability are described. This is the first experimental work on negative permeability reported in the mid-IR. In addition, interferometric lithography (IL) combined with self-aligned semiconductor processing techniques were used for the fabrication, leading to large area samples with good uniformity.; By combining structures with magnetic response and electrical response, a negative refractive index metamaterial is designed and fabricated using IL. The refractive index of the fabricated structure is obtained uniquely from the experimental results by measuring both the amplitude and phase of the transmission and reflectance. This is the first demonstration of negative index metamaterials in the near-IR, about 4 orders of magnitude shorter than previously reported work. Furthermore, parametric studies and experimental results show that better design with very low loss can be achieved, which might lead to more useful applications. |
