5. Conclusions and outlook

The possibility of manufacturing left-handed metamaterials is now a reality in both microwave and optical applications. Demonstrators have been validated in microwave, THz, infrared and ultraviolet optics. Components such as prisms and flat lenses have been produced in these fields.

This field of research, which emerged at the end of the 1990s, is now well established, with concepts and techniques available for designing applications in various fields. Without the two publications by J. Pendry and colleagues in 1998 and 1999, the concept studied by V. Veselago in 1964 would have remained purely theoretical.

So far, no real microwave applications have emerged. Attempts have been made to apply the perfect lens principle to antennas, in order to generate large near-fields. However, they are hampered by the difficulty of producing a low-loss...