Cover illustration

Vol. 5, No. 3, 2010

In recent years, metamaterials has stimulated the interest of many researchers due to their many important applications, such as negative refraction, super-imaging and invisible cloak. According to the well known effective-media model, the coupling interactions between the elements in metamaterials are somewhat ignored; therefore, the effective properties of metamaterials can be viewed as the “averaged effect” of the resonance property of the individual elements. However, the coupling interaction between elements should always exist when they are arranged into metamaterials. Sometimes, especially when the elements are very close, this coupling effect is not negligible and will have a substantial effect on the metamaterials’ properties. The cover picture shows a particularly interesting and typical coupled metamaterials, whose unit cell is composed of two identical split-ring resonators. The inductive interaction between these two magnetic “atoms” introduces the split the resonance, which strongly depends on the separation distance between the resonators. More details could be found in the article "Hybridization effect in coupled metamaterials" by Hui LIU(刘辉), Tao LI(李涛), Shu-ming WANG(王漱明) and Shi-ning ZHU(祝世宁), pp 277-290. [Photo credits: Tao LI(李涛) and Hui LIU(刘辉), Nanjing University, China]

 Contents

         Recent Advances in Artificial Wave Functional Materials: Photonic Crystals, Metamaterials and Plasmonics

       Guest Editors: Xiang ZHANG (张翔) and Shi-ning ZHU (祝世宁)