Modeling of electromagnetic metamaterials

Numerical modeling and experiment have the same importance in revealing the unusual properties of electromagnetic metamaterials. On one hand, the numerical modeling can confirm the experiments on metamaterials; on the other hand, it can explore the properties of metamaterials in extreme conditions which cannot be performed experimentally. In this paper, we investigate the numerical modeling of metamaterials from two approaches: the full-wave simulations of realistic periodic or non-periodic structures, and the effective-medium simulations of the equivalent homogeneous or inhomogeneous materials. We show that both approaches are valid to model artificial metamaterials, which provide similar results to experiments under the same condition. However, the effective-medium approach is much more efficient in both memory requirement and CPU time.