Introduction to Metamaterials

There have been increasing interests in metamaterials in the past 10 years in the scientific communities. However, metamaterials are sometimes regarded as left-handed materials or negative refractive index materials by a lot of people including researchers. In fact, the rapid development in this exciting area has shown that metamaterials are far beyond left-handed materials. In this chapter, we will clarify what metamaterial is and report the recent progress on metamaterials. We also summarize the important issues for the development and future of metamaterials, including the optical transformation, effective medium theory for periodic structures, broadband and low-loss metamaterials, rapid design of metamaterials, and potential applications. The impact of computational electromagnetics on metamaterials is briefly discussed.