For Beginners Print

This page is for you if you start working in the field of electromagnetic characterization of complex nanostructured materials and metamaterials, or if you work with nanostructured materials and want to learn how their electromagnetic and optical properties can be assessed.


Here is your roadmap for the materials of this web site (ECONAM project) and on some hopefully useful tutorials which can be found elsewhere.

Recently, there appeared new nanofabrication technologies that allow realization of nanostructured materials with novel, unusual, and practically useful properties. These new materials are often called “metamaterials”. For introductory information about metamaterials we recommend the web site of the Metamorphose Virtual Institute. To learn about history of this research field you can see, fro example,  E. Shamonina and L. Solymar, Metamaterials: How the subject started, Metamaterials, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 12-18, 2007 and also in this review based on a paper presented at the Latsis Symposium 2005.

Probably the most general definition of metamaterial reads: Metamaterial is an arrangement of artificial structural elements, designed to achieve advantageous and unusual electromagnetic properties (see details and references e.g. here).

ECONAM project delivered overview lectures on basics of metamaterial electromagnetics. Basics of metamaterial electromagnetics were taught at a short course of EUPROMETA (with participation of ECONAM) (Levi lectures).

Electromagnetic properties of “usual” materials are well described by such parameters as permittivity, permeability, conductivity. In optics, usually only complex permittivity is enough to characterize the material, and there are well developed experimental techniques for measuring these parameters (such as ellipsometry). In contrast, electromagnetic characterization of metamaterials presents a serious challenge for researchers. This is a developing field and many important questions still have no answers. ECONAM is trying to help.

A good starting point is the EC-sponsored brochure "Nanostructured Metamaterials". It contains overviews of electromagnetic properties of complex materials and an introductory chapter on electromagnetic characterization.

ECONAM project has developed an introductory lecture on electromagnetic characterization of metamatrerials.

An introductory lecture on the notion of characteristic material parameters of metamaterials was delivered on the ECONAM short course 2009. A lecture on basics of homogenization of complex electromagnetic materials can be dowloaded from here (VI/ECONAM short course 2008). Also you can be interested in this introductory lecture on basics of experimental characterization (from one our schools).

On this website we compiled a comprehensive bibliography on the parameters extraction. You can start from the review papers recommended there.

NEW: A step-by-step road map for experimental characterization of metamaterials has been posted on this page.

NEW: A tutorial overview of approaches to electromagnetic characterization of nanostructured materials has been posted here.

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