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Brief Communication Arising

Nature 455, E10-E11 (23 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07359; Received 3 June 2008; Accepted 31 July 2008

There is a Letter (15 November 2007) associated with this document.

There is a Brief Communication Arising (23 October 2008) associated with this document.

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Can light be stopped in realistic metamaterials?

A. Reza1, M. M. Dignam1 & S. Hughes1

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Arising from: K. L. Tsakmakidis, A. D. Boardman & O. Hess Nature 450, 397–401 (2007); Tsakmakidis et al. reply

Tsakmakidis et al.1 extend earlier work (for example, refs 2, 3) in proposing a novel metamaterial waveguide structure that can stop broadband light, producing so-called "trapped rainbows". The authors make the bold assumption that metamaterial loss can be ignored: but material loss, with dispersion, is an inherent feature of negative-index metamaterials (for example, refs 4, 5); any realistic model must include loss and dispersion to satisfy the fundamental principle of causality6. Here we revisit the authors' predictions1 and show that even when an arbitrarily small metamaterial loss is introduced, it is impossible to stop the light; moreover, we find that all slow-light modes in such structures give impractically large propagation losses.

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