Passive and active metamaterial constructs and their impact on electrically small radiating and scattering systems

In the decade since the inception of the metamaterials field, there have been a number of exciting advances in understanding and confirming many of their exotic physics properties. Many of these attributes have led to the consideration of engineering metamaterials and metamaterial-inspired structures for a variety of applications. This includes the miniaturization of resonators and their use for improving the performance characteristics of electrically small antennas in the VHF, UHF and microwave regimes and of electrically small scatterers in the optical regime. Active metamaterial constructs have been introduced to increase the bandwidths at low frequencies and to overcome the losses at high frequencies. The theoretical designs of many of these highly subwavelength systems and their simulated performance characteristics have been confirmed experimentally. These concurrences between theory and experiment will be highlighted.