Negative refraction in photonic crystals and metamaterials for transformation optics

This thesis is about metamaterials and its application in negative refraction, slow light and transformation optics. Metamaterials have properties not available in nature and are typically man-made. They have exciting applications such as invisible cloaking, modulators, band-pass filters, perfect lenses, subwavelength resolution, beam compressors, slow-light devices and so on. We demonstrated one-dimensional, two-dimensional photonic crystals negative lenses, prisms, flat lens theoretically and experimentally at both microwave and optical frequency. We roposed a new mechanism on surface grating to realize negative refraction in photonics crystals. This approach can be used to image large and/or far way objects. We studied the slow light effect in extremely anisotropic nano-wire and planar waveguide consisting of conventional dielectric cladding with single-negative materials. Super-resolution imaging in three-dimensional metamaterial nanolens consisting of nanowires template is also demonstrated.