Metamaterials is a young subject born in the 21st century. It is concerned with artificial materials which can have electrical and magnetic properties difficult or impossible to find in nature. The building blocks in most cases are resonant elements much smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of research in this field at a level that should appeal to final year undergraduates in physics or in electrical and electronic engineering. The mathematics is kept at a minimum; the aim is to explain the physics in simple terms and enumerate the major advances. It can be profitably read by graduate and post-graduate students in order to find out what has been done in the field outside their speciality, and by experts who may gain new insight about the inter-relationship of the physical phenomena involved.
Laszlo Solymar is an Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and received the equivalent of a Ph.D in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he settled in England where he worked first in industry and later at the University of Oxford. He did research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrück, Berlin, Madrid and Budapest. He published 8 books and over 250 papers. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995. He received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1992.