Negative effective permeability and left-handed materials at optical frequencies

We present here the design of nano-inclusions made of properly arranged collections of plasmonic metallic nano-particles that may exhibit a resonant magnetic dipole collective response in the visible domain. When such inclusions are embedded in a host medium, they may provide metamaterials with negative effective permeability at optical frequencies. We also show how the same inclusions may provide resonant electric dipole response and, when combining the two effects at the same frequencies, left-handed materials with both negative effective permittivity and permeability may be synthesized in the optical domain with potential applications for imaging and nano-optics applications. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.