Water: Promising Opportunities for Tunable All-dielectric Electromagnetic Metamaterials

Abstract

We reveal an outstanding potential of water as an inexpensive, abundant and bio-friendly high-refractive-index material for creating tunable all-dielectric photonic structures and metamaterials. Specifically, we demonstrate thermal, mechanical and gravitational tunability of magnetic and electric resonances in a metamaterial consisting of periodically positioned water-filled reservoirs. The proposed water-based metamaterials can find applications not only as cheap and ecological microwave devices, but also in optical and terahertz metamaterials prototyping and educational lab equipment.