A low-loss double-fishnet metamaterial based on transparent conductive oxide

Abstract

In this work, we consider the applicability of transparent conductive oxide (TCO) materials such as indium tin oxide (ITO) for the fabrication of fishnet metamaterials. We utilized the finite element method to simulate the scattering parameters of the ITO-based fishnet metamaterial with rectangular aperture in a 300 nm-square unit cell. We further used effective extraction methods to retrieve the complex effective refractive index and the impedance of the metamaterial. We calculated the figure of merit defined as the ratio between the real and the imaginary parts of the effective dielectric permittivity of the ITO-based double-fishnet metamaterial and compared it with that of gold-based fishnets. We conclude that the use of TCO can decrease overall losses in fishnet metamaterial and increase the figure of merit. Our approach does not require the use of active media with external pumping and at the same time is applicable to any metamaterial geometry.