Extraction of effective permittivity and permeability of dispersive double-negative slabs using evolutionary programming

A major area of recent research involves the study of and realization of double-negative (DNG) metamaterials. DNG metamaterials are bulk materials in which both the permittivity and the permeability are simultaneously negative. This work investigates the potential for applying evolutionary algorithms. In particular, we apply evolutionary programming (EP) to the problem of parameter extraction of DNG metamaterials. EP has been shown to be well-suited for optimization of highly non-linear continuous parameter objective functions that may manifest epistatic behavior, and has been previously applied to a number of challenging electromagnetic problems. Utilizing the EP optimization, it may be possible to extract the effective parameters, including frequency dependence, from the S-parameters of a slab of arbitrary thickness.