ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the methods that have been successfully employed for the fabrication of photonic metamaterials. Photonic metamaterials open up a way to overcome the constraints set by ordinary materials. The basic idea is to create an artificial crystal with deep subwavelength periods. Electron-beam lithography (EBL) is a widely used technique for the fabrication of planar nanostructures. EBL has been the most commonly used fabrication technique for photonic metamterials. EBL can be also employed for the fabrication of a sequence of planar metamaterial layers. For EBL, the fabrication of high-quality samples requires time-consuming dose tests and processing steps, leading to relatively long overall fabrication times. While EBL and focused ion-beam nanostructuring are suitable for proof-of-principle studies, their serial nature inhibits the fabrication of metamaterial layers on the scale of usual optical coatings at reasonable fabrication cost and time.
