Spherical resonators acting as rf replicas of plasmonic nanospheres

The experimental investigation of recently proposed nanophotonic devices and metamaterials based on the plasmonic nanospheres is rather difficult and expensive using the present technology of nano-fabrication. Here, we propose the idea of scaled experiments in the RF regime, based on the spherical resonators that behave similarly to the plasmonic nanospheres. Two different designs, based on well-known Best's four-arm spherical resonator and on Stuart's spherical resonator were tested experimentally in 500 MHz and 1 GHz bands. It was found possible to construct the linear chains of the resonators and to demonstrate both the backward-wave propagation and the forward-wave propagation, which is consistent with already published theoretical predictions.