A stratiform hyperbolic metamaterial comprises multiple units of symmetrical metal-dielectric film, stacked to have a precisely equivalent refractive index, admittance, and iso-frequency curve. A metamaterial that is composed of stacks of symmetrical films as a waveguide to couple a diffracted wave into a horizontally propagating plasmonic wave is designed herein. By tuning the parameters of the constituent thin films within a hyperbolic metamaterial, both the loss of the plasmonic wave and admittance matching are minimized and optimized, respectively.
