Metamaterials and negative refractive index

Recently, artificially constructed metamaterials have become of considerable inter-est, because these materials can exhibit electromagnetic characteristics unlike those of any conventional materials. Artificial magnetism and negative refractive index are two specific types of behavior that have been demonstrated over the past few years, illustrating the new physics and new applications possible when we expand our view as to what constitutes a material. In this review, we describe recent advances in metamaterials research and discuss the potential that these materials may hold for realizing new and seemingly exotic electromagnetic phenomena. Consider light passing through a plateof glass. We know that light is anelectromagnetic wave, consisting of oscillating electric and magnetic fields, and characterized by a wavelength, . Because visible light has a wavelength that is hun-dreds of times larger than the atoms of which the glass is composed, the atomic details lose importance in describing how the glass inter