Abstract

Metamaterials are artificial materials with properties that do not exist normally in nature. Advances in nanoscale fabrication allow for the realization of optical metamaterials which allow us to manipulate light in ways that were orignially not thought to be possible. These materials are composed of subwavelength electromagnetic structures place very close to one another. Due to mutual coupling between the individual structures, they present properties to incident electromagnetic radiation (such as light) that are different from those associated with the material from which the structures are comprised of. In this talk we use periodic arrays of multiwalled carbon nanotubes as subwavelength structures to produce optical metamaterials that exhibit artificial dielectric properties and band gaps within the optical regime.