Ultra small mode volume defect cavities in spatially ordered and disordered metamaterials

In this letter, we study metamaterials made out of resonant electric wires arranged on a spatial scale much smaller than the free space wavelength, and we show that they present a hybridization band that is insensible to positional disorder. We experimentally demonstrate defect cavities in disordered and ordered samples and prove that, analogous to those designed in photonic crystals, those cavities can present very high quality factors. In addition, we show that they display mode volumes much smaller than a wavelength cube, owing to the deep subwavelength nature of the unit cell. We underline that this type of structure can be shrunk down to a period close of a few skin depth. Our approach paves the way towards the confinement and manipulation of waves at deep subwavelength scales in both ordered and disordered metamaterials. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.