Invisible plasmonic meta-materials through impedance matching to vacuum

We report on perfect transmission in two-dimensional plasmonic matamaterials in the terahertz frequency range, in which zeroth order transmittance becomes essentially unity near specific resonance frequencies. Perfect transmission may occur when the plasmonic metamaterials are perfectly impedance matched to vacuum, which is equivalent to designing an effective dielectric constant around epsilon(r) = -2. When the effective dielectric constant of the metamaterial is tuned towards epsilon(r) and the hole coverage is larger than 0.2, strong evanescent field builds up in the near field, making perfect transmission possible. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.