Figure 2.

Comparison of the effective medium dispersion of a nanowire-based hyperbolic metamaterial (A) to the exact solution for photonic crystal (B). The hyper-crystal unit cell in (B) is assumed to be 1000 nm, with one half of the cell is filled with the same ferrofluid while another half is pure kerosene. The ferrofluid aligned by external magnetic field applied in the z-direction, is characterized by the material parameters described in Fig. 3. The stratified ferrofluid is assumed to form layers with the normal along the x-direction. The effective medium dispersion in panel (A) uses the dielectric permittivity tensor obtained by the homegenization of the electromagnetic response of the hyper-crystal unit cell. This is an artificial result that would be expected if we could experimentally isolate magnetic field induced hyperbolic behaviour of the ferrofluid from its photonic hyper-crystal behaviour. In both panels, the wavevector components are given in units of the free-space wavenumber k₀.