Physics Chat
Spatial dispersion in the wire medium
Speaker: Jordan Wilson (Dr Georgina Klemencic's group)
Date: Thursday 19 October 2023
Time: 14:00
Venue: Queen's Building Room N/2.05
The wire medium, a simple metamaterial comprising an array of parallel conducting wires, has long been studied for its ease of fabrication and useful properties. For example, adjusting the structure of the medium can tune its homogenised relative permittivity to negative values, a property which enables it to be used in the creation of sub-diffraction-limited lenses. However, the utility of the wire medium is complicated by the presence of spatial dispersion, a highly nonlocal effect. By treating the constituent wires by the Drude model characterised by a finite plasma frequency, we investigate the origin of spatial dispersion and its consequences on the electrodynamics in the wire medium. As a function of the wire plasma frequency, we present analytical forms and numerical analyses of the dispersion relation and reflection/transmission coefficients of the medium.