What is a good conductor for metamaterials or plasmonics

• Main Authors: Soukoulis Costas M., Koschny Thomas, Tassin Philippe, Shen Nian-Hai, Dastmalchi Babak
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2015-04-01
• Series: Nanophotonics
• Subjects: optics; metamaterials; plasmonics; conductors
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2014-0013
• ISSN: 2192-8606; 2192-8614

We review conducting materials like metals, conducting oxides and graphene for nanophotonic applications. We emphasize that metamaterials and plasmonic systems benefit from different conducting materials. Resonant metamaterials need conductors with small resistivity, since dissipative loss in resonant metamaterials is proportional to the real part of the resistivity of the conducting medium it contains. For plasmonic systems, one must determine the propagation length at a desired level of confinement to estimate the dissipative loss.