Effective medium concept in temporal metamaterials

Metamaterials are mostly designed in the time-harmonic scenario where wave propagation can be spatially manipulated. Tailoring the electromagnetic response of media in time has also gained the attention of the scientific community in order to achieve further control on wave-matter interaction both in space and time. In the present work, a temporally effective medium concept in metamaterial is theoretically investigated as a mechanism to create a medium with a desired effective permittivity. Similar to spatially subwavelength multilayered metamaterials, the proposed “temporal multilayered”, or “multistepped” metamaterial, is designed by alternating in time the permittivity of the medium between two values. In so doing, the temporally periodic medium can be modeled as an effective metamaterial in time with an effective permittivity initiated by a step function. The analogy between the temporal multistepped and the spatial multilayered metamaterials is presented demonstrating the duality between both domains. The proposed temporal metamaterial is analytically and numerically evaluated showing an excellent agreement with the designed parameters. Moreover, it is shown how the effective permittivity can be arbitrarily tailored by changing the duty cycle of the periodic temporal metamaterial. This performance is also connected to the spatial multilayer scenario in terms of the filling fraction of the different materials used to create the multilayered structures.