Re: negative permeability and permittivity

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

Timothy S. Sullivan wrote:
> I just got back from the March Meeting and attended a session on Friday
> where Sheldon Shults gave a brief reprise of the talk he gave earlier in
> the week. I checked a few concepts with his collaborator David Smith
> after the session. I'll try to summarize what I heard.
> ...

More from the authors themselves, including an mpeg simulation of their
setup at http://physics.ucsd.edu/~rshelby/lhmedia/intro.html

See also
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2000/split/pnu476-1.htm for some
background, including the following overview of the development:

"Such a material was first envisioned in the 1960's by the Russian
physicist Victor Veselago of the Lebedev Physics Institute (Soviet
Physics Uspekhi, Jan-Feb 1968), who argued that a material with both a
negative electric permittivity and a negative magnetic permeability
would, when light passed through it, result in novel optical phenomena,
including a reverse Doppler shift, an inverse Snell effect (the optical
illusion which makes a pencil dipped into water seem to bend), and
reverse Cerenkov radiation. Permittivity (denoted by the Greek letter
epsilon) is a measure of a material's response to an applied electric
field, while permeability (denoted by the letter mu) is a measure of the
material's response to an applied magnetic field. In Veselago's day no
negative-mu materials were known, nor thought likely to exist. More
recently, however, John Pendry of Imperial College has shown how
negative-epsilon materials could be built from rows of wires (Pendry et
al., Physical Review Letters, 17 June, 1996) and negative-mu materials
from arrays of tiny resonant rings (Pendry et al., IEEE, Trans. MTT 47,
2075, 1999). "