Discretely guided electromagnetic effective medium

A material comprised of an array of subwavelength coaxial waveguides decomposes incident electromagnetic waves into spatially discrete wave components, propagates these components without frequency cutoff, and reassembles them on the far side of the material. The propagation of these wave components is fully controlled by the physical properties of the waveguides and their geometrical distribution in the array. This allows for an exceptional degree of control over the electromagnetic response of this effective medium, with numerous potential applications. With the development of nanoscale subwavelength coaxial waveguides, these applications (including metamaterial functionality) can be enabled in the visible frequency range. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics.