Deep subwavelength beam propagation in extremely loss-anisotropic metamaterials

Metal–dielectric multilayer metamaterials with extreme loss-anisotropy, in which the longitudinal component of the permittivity tensor has an ultra-large imaginary part, are proposed and designed. Diffraction-free deep subwavelength beam propagation and manipulation, due to the nearly flat iso-frequency contour, is demonstrated in such loss-anisotropic metamaterials. It is also shown that deep subwavelength beam propagation can be realized in practical multilayer structures with large multilayer periods, when the nonlocal effect is considered. (paper)