Holographic Optics and Negative Refractive Index

Understand

In recent years a very exciting and intense activity has been devoted to the understanding and construction of materials that enjoy exotic optical properties, such as a negative refractive index.

• Motivated by these experimental and theoretical developments, we use the string-inspired idea of holography to study the electromagnetic response of a certain class of media: strongly coupled relativistic systems that admit a dual gravitational description.
• Our results indicate that this type of media generally have a negative refractive index.
• Moreover we observe that a negative refractive index could be a common feature of relativistic hydrodynamic systems at low frequencies.