Metamaterials: A new direction in materials science

A review is presented of materials science of metamaterials, i.e., the area of research that has been extensively developed over the last decade. Metamaterials are artificial materials consisting of structural elements, whose type and mutual arrangement can be specified during the fabrication. The development of metamaterials was associated initially with the idea of the design of electromagnetic media with a negative refractive index and, more recently, with the prospect for fabrication of superlenses, invisible objects, and other optical devices. As a result, there appeared a new branch of materials science and an intimately related new branch of optics—transformation optics. This review has discussed the main directions of research in this field and problems encountered in this way. It is noted that metamaterials cannot be designed without invoking the most modern tools for performing numerical simulation and that their implementation requires the use of high-level technologies. The idea of metamaterials is important not only for optics and electromagnetism but also for acoustics.