Validation and characterization of optical metamaterials.

Metamaterials (MTMs) have gained lots of interest in recent years due to their interesting electromagnetic characteristics and many applications. Validation of the unique properties of fabricated optical MTMs is a critical part in the development process of optical MTM devices such as waveguides, resonators, focusing lenses, cloaking, etc. It is effective in terms of cost, time, and use of resources to validate these properties at the material-level before integrating into a device. A novel optical testbed has been designed, built, and utilized for the validation and characterization of a novel optical MTM. Reflectivity measurements as a function of incidence angle (angle-scan) or wavelength (wavelength-scan) for both P- and S- Polarizations are only required for the validation and characterization. Since the transmitted signal is not needed our method is not limited to only thin and/or low-loss samples. The testbed is simple, it is based on Surface Plasmon (SP) Coupling onto the surface of the sample, and consists of fairly inexpensive equipment found in most optical labs. Furthermore, it validates the Double Negative (DNG), epsilon