Customer Reviews

Metamaterials: Critique and Alternatives

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Dr. Munk was a brilliant radio scientist, but his critique of Metamaterials is full of technical errors. Dr. Munk uses expansion into inhomogeneous plane waves and Floquet Theorem to explain why Metamaterials are a fallacy, but both of these techniques are simplifications of Maxwell's equations and assume that only the far-field is present. Dr. Munk ignores the fact that Metamaterials often depend upon non-linear resonators which store energy which combines with incident RF waves to produce Metamaterial effects. To analyze Metamaterials you need to consider all of Maxwell's equations, you can't rely on techniques that simplify Maxwell's equations by assuming no stored energy and only the far-field exists. Dr. Munk points to early experiments where air dominated the Metamaterial region as proof of his assertions, but imperfect experimental results do not prove Metamaterial theory is invalid.

I agree with Dr. Munk that science has always been plagued by occasional hype or misdirected work. It has also always been plagued by "experts" who claim that the earth is flat when the burden of mathematical and physical evidence proves otherwise.

This book was a good summary of theories used in frequency selective surfaces and the like, but I'm disappointed that the arguments presented were not thoroughly considered.

I am a graduate student and newcomer in the young field of metamaterial research. This field has more or less a decade of history and has increasingly attracted attention and generated a lot of scholarly works. The main reason as the book author shows is the fantastic new devices that could be created with "negative refractive index" metamaterials such as "perfect lenses" and "invisibility cloaks". The author's deep experience and background in electromagnetic scattering in periodic structures allows him to revisit the fundamental principles and assumptions upon which some of the most amazing properties of metamaterials are based on. He thus demonstrates that while some assumptions are mathematically true, most are either physically false or violates causality (i.e. common sense!). The author also analyzes the results of published experiments that purposely demonstrates a "negative refractive index" or cloaking and concludes that most of them are not correctly interpreted. He thus provides the correct interpretation of these experiments based on classical electromagnetic theory. The book allowed me to better put in perspective many of the claims in the field of metamaterials (which had already raised some personal concerns...). I think that for any newcomer or established scientist, this book which aims to clarify some misconceptions, is a great addition in the understanding of metamaterials.

This book is a MUST READ for anyone who finds herself/himself interested in the field of metamaterials. Especially if you are a graduate student conducting research in the area of Electromagnetics or Optics, I do recommend you to purchase this book or at least borrow it from the library and read it. It is extremely well written and the arguments are very nicely presented so that anyone with basic background in the EM theory can completely understand it.

The term "metamaterial" is a very broad term and covers a lot of interesting research activities. A lot of interesting research work has been conducted over the past decade that falls within the domain of "metamaterials". However, there is quite a bit of "science fiction" going on in this field as well. This books studies and addresses these "science fiction" aspects of the field of metamaterials. These include several very important issues including the so called "negative refraction" of light. The author provides very reasonable arguments describing why these phenomena cannot occur. More importantly, the author provides simpler explanations for some experimental results that have been reported in support of phenomena such as negative refraction of light.

The author is one of the world's foremost experts in the field of periodic structures and their applications in EM and Antennas. Any antenna engineer who had to design some sort of a wideband antenna array has probably read one of his other books ("Finite Antenna Arrays and FSS" and "Frequency Selective Surfaces: Analysis and Design"). As it happens, to this date, almost every result that has been presented in the field of metamaterials (with a few exceptions) has utilized some sort of a periodic structure. Therefore, it just makes common sense to hear what one of the world's foremost experts in periodic structures thinks about these other periodic structures....