Validity Range of Model of Effective Medium for Describing Layered Metal-Dielectric Nanostructured Metamaterials

摘要

The strong spatial dispersion effects in a layered metal-dielectric metamaterial are demonstrated by analyzing its dispersion properties and calculating its transmission and reflection coefficients. The descriptions of this metamaterial by a model of effective medium and by an exact method of transmission matrices are compared in detail. It is shown that the electromagnetic properties of the considered metamaterial cannot be completely described in terms of the local effective model, because of the occurrence of additional eigenmodes, which are caused by the spatial dispersion. This circumstance is a critically important feature near the resonant absorption line of surface plasmon-polaritons.