Layered superconductors as negative-refractive-index metamaterials

A. L. Rakhmanov; V. A. Yampol’skii; J. A. Fan; Federico Capasso; Franco Nori

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.81.075101

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Layered superconductors as negative-refractive-index metamaterials

A. L. Rakhmanov, V. A. Yampol’skii, J. A. Fan, Federico Capasso, Franco Nori

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.81.075101 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

We analyze the use of layered superconductors as strongly anisotropic metamaterials, which can possess negative-refractive-index in a wide frequency range. Superconductors are of particular interest because they have the potential to support low losses, which is critical for applications such as super-resolution imaging. We show that low-Tc (s-wave) superconductors can be used to construct layered heterostructures with low losses for T⪡Tc. However, the real part of their in-plane effective permittivity is very large, making coupling into the structure difficult. Moreover, even at low temperatures, layered high-Tc superconductors have a large in-plane normal conductivity, producing large losses (due to d-wave symmetry). Therefore, it is difficult to enhance the evanescent modes in either low-Tc or high-Tc superconductors.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

Formula	Reported Tc (K)	Pressure (GPa)	Type
Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	90	Pressure not reported	unknown
Nb Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	9.3	Pressure not reported	unknown