PLoS ONE (Jan 2017)
Effective media properties of hyperuniform disordered composite materials.
Abstract
The design challenge of new functional composite materials consisting of multiphase materials has attracted an increasing interest in recent years. In particular, understanding the role of distributions of ordered and disordered particles in a host media is scientifically and technologically important for designing novel materials and devices with superior spectral and angular properties. In this work, the effective medium property of disordered composite materials consisting of hyperuniformly distributed hard particles at different filling fractions is investigated. To accurately extract effective permittivity of a disordered composite material, a full-wave finite element method and the transmission line theory are used. Numerical results show that the theory of hyperuniformity can be conveniently used to design disordered composite materials with good accuracy compared with those materials with randomly dispersed particles. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a Luneburg lens based on the proposed hyperuniform media has superior radiation properties in comparison with previously reported metamaterial designs and it may open up a new avenue in electromagnetic materials-by-design.