ABSTRACT
Metamaterials are artificially engineered periodic structures that possess desirable electromagnetic properties that cannot be found in naturally occurring materials. For instance, metamaterials allow one to create negative permittivity and/or permeability, and consequently a negative refractive index to construct the so-called left-handed material. The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is one of the most popular numerical techniques in modeling electromagnetic structures, thanks to its ability of dealing with inhomogeneous, anisotropic, and frequency dispersive materials. The chapter introduces the modeling of different types of optical metamaterials using the FDTD method. To characterize these metamaterials accurately, either the conventional FDTD method is improved, or new FDTD schemes are developed. The chapter provides details of the developed FDTD schemes. The structures considered include the optical cloaking structures for reducing scattering cross sections, the hyperlens structures for simultaneous imaging and magnification of subwavelength source distributions, and nanoplasmonic waveguides for enhancing light transmissions.
