Left-Handed Metamaterials Studies and their Application to Accelerator Physics

Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying artificial materials, known as Left-Handed Metamaterials (LHM), to accelerator physics. These materials have both negative permittivity and permeability and therefore possess several unusual properties: the index of refraction is negative and the direction of the group velocity is antiparallel to the direction of the phase velocity (along k). These properties lead to a reverse Cherenkov effect [1,7], which has potential beam diagnostic applications, in addition to accelerator applications. Several LHM devices with different configurations are being experimentally and theoretically studied at Argonne. We are investigating the possibility of building a Cherenkov detector based on LHM and propose an experiment to observe the reverse radiation generated by an electron beam passing through a LHM. The potential advantage of a LHM detector is that the radiation in this case is emitted in the direction reversed to the direction of the beam, so it could be easier to get a clean measurement.