Metamaterials are typically engineered by arranging a set of small scatterers or apertures in a regular array throughout a region of space, thus obtaining some desirable bulk electromagnetic behavior. The desired property is often one that is not normally found naturally (negative refractive index, near-zero index, etc.). Over the past ten years, metamaterials have moved from being simply a theoretical concept to a field with developed and marketed applications. Three-dimensional metamaterials can be extended by arranging electrically small scatterers or holes into a two-dimensional pattern at a surface or interface. This surface version of a metamaterial has been given the name metasurface (the term metafilm has also been employed for certain structures). For many applications, metasurfaces can be used in place of metamaterials. Metasurfaces have the advantage of taking up less physical space than do full three-dimensional metamaterial structures; consequently, metasurfaces offer the possibility of less-lossy structures. In this overview paper, we discuss the theoretical basis by which metasurfaces should be characterized, and discuss their various applications. We will see how metasurfaces are distinguished from conventional frequency-selective surfaces. Metasurfaces have a wide range of potential applications in electromagnetics (ranging from low microwave to optical frequencies), including: (1) controllable “smart” surfaces, (2) miniaturized cavity resonators, (3) novel wave-guiding structures, (4) angular-independent surfaces, (5) absorbers, (6) biomedical devices, (7) terahertz switches, and (8) fluid-tunable frequency-agile materials, to name only a few. In this review, we will see that the development in recent years of such materials and/or surfaces is bringing us closer to realizing the exciting speculations made over one hundred years ago by the work of Lamb, Schuster, and Pocklington, and later by Mandel'shtam and Veselago.

The limiting effects of varying the thickness of a dielectric overlayer on planar double split-ring resonator (SRR) arrays are studied by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. Uniform dielectric overlayers from 100 nm to 16 µm thick are deposited onto fixed SRR arrays in order to shift the resonance frequency of the electric response. We discuss the bounds of resonance shifting and emphasize the resulting limitations for SRR-based sensing. These results are presented in the context of typical biosensing situations and are compared to previous work and other existing sensing platforms.

Planar electric split ring resonator (eSRR) metamaterials and their corresponding inverse structures are designed and characterized computationally and experimentally utilizing finite element modeling and THz time domain spectroscopy. A complementary response is observed in transmission. Specifically, for the eSRRs a decrease in transmission is observed at resonance whereas the inverse structures display an increase in transmission. The frequency dependent effective complex dielectric functions are extracted from the experimental data and, in combination with simulations to determine the surface current density and local electric field,provide considerable insight into the electromagnetic response of our planar metamaterials. These structures may find applications in the construction of various THz filters, transparent THz windows, or THz grid structures ideal for constructing THz switching/modulation devices.

We demonstrated giant optical activity using a chiral metamaterial composed of an array of conjugated bilayer metal structures. The chiral metamaterials were further integrated with photoactive inclusions to accomplish a wide tuning range of the optical activity through illumination with near-infrared light. The strong chirality observed in our metamaterials results in a negative refractive index, which can also be well controlled by the near-infrared optical excitation.