Designing metamaterials for the optical regime

Left-handed metamaterials (i.e. metamaterials with electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability both negative, resulting to negative index of refraction) are becoming recently a subject of continuously increasing interest, owing to their novel and unique properties (like backwards propagation, negative refraction, super-resolution, etc) and thus the new capabilities that they can provide in the manipulation of electromagnetic waves. These novel properties and capabilities of left-handed materials have motivated strong research efforts to push the operation frequency of such materials from the initially achieved microwave regime to the infrared and optical regime. In this talk we will review the current status on the optical left-handed metamaterials research, and we will present our efforts: (a) to understand various aspects of the wave propagation in optical left-handed materials, (b) to obtain novel and/or optimized optical left-handed metamaterial designs, and (c) to explore new phenomena and possibilities available with optical left-handed metamaterials.