Sum rules and physical bounds on passive metamaterials

Abstract

Frequency dependence of the permittivity and permeability is inevitable in metamaterial applications such as cloaking and perfect lenses. In this paper, Herglotz functions are used as a tool to construct sum rules from which we derive physical bounds suited for metamaterial applications, where the material parameters are often designed to be negative or near zero in the frequency band of interest. Several sum rules are presented that relate the temporal dispersion of the material parameters with the difference between the static and instantaneous parameter values, which are used to give upper bounds on the bandwidth of the application. This substantially advances the understanding of the behavior of metamaterials with extraordinary material parameters, and reveals a beautiful connection between properties in the design band (finite frequencies) and the low- and high-frequency limits. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.