"Slow" light in metamaterials

Abstract

We demonstrate that propagation of microwave pulses can be significantly affected by the presence of a planar fish-scale metamaterial, which is at least 30 times thinner than the wavelength. In the resonant band of the fish-scale structure, a spectrally narrow pulse (18 ns) can be significantly delayed (by 5.6 ns) as if propagating through an 84 cm thick dielectric (epsilon=3.77), while a short pulse (220 ps) will split in two roughly equal pulses propagating with subluminal and superluminal velocity respectively. We also interpret the response of the metamaterial in terms of effective material parameters