A Quick and Easy Simulation Procedure to Aid in Metamaterial Unit-Cell Design

In this letter, a simple simulation procedure is presented and used to design a negative-index metamaterial unit cell. The procedure is based upon full-wave simulations of a single unit cell where electric and magnetic drives are separated to significantly simplify the interpretation of the effective-media response. More specifically, by extracting polarizabilities from the far-field response of the resonator under these drive conditions, the effective-media parameters are shown to be nicely correlated with the resonant responses of the resonator. For the purposes of demonstrating this simulation procedure, a negative-index metamaterial design based on a composite unit cell containing a split-ring-resonator and z-dipole is employed as a straightforward example.