Electroinductive waves role in left-handed stacked complementary split rings resonators

In this letter it is presented a Left-Handed Metamaterial design route based upon stacked arrays of screens made of complementary split rings resonators under normal incidence in the microwave regime. Computation of the dispersion diagram highlights the possibility to obtain backward waves provided the longitudinal lattice is small enough. The experimental results are in good agreement with the computed ones. The physics underlying the Left-Handed behavior is found to rely on electroinductive waves, playing the mutual capacitive coupling the major role to explain the phenomenon. Our route to Left-Handed metamaterial introduced in this paper based on stacking CSRRs screens can be scaled to millimeter and terahertz for future applications. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America