Effective optical parameters of thin-film and bulk metamaterials of metallodielectric nanosandwiches

We report on the effective optical response of single- and multilayer periodic structures of metallodielectric nanosandwiches on the basis of rigorous, full-electrodynamic calculations by the extended layer-multiple-scattering method. It is shown that the complex photonic band structure and the reflection coefficient of the infinite and semi-infinite crystal, respectively, provide reliable bulk effective parameters, which can be used as a reference in order to resolve ambiguities and problems in the determination of these parameters for finite slabs by the S-matrix retrieval procedure. Our results show that the structures under consideration exhibit strong artificial optical magnetism and thin films consisting of a few layers already behave like the bulk meta material. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.