In this work, we investigate the influence of the plasmonic properties of metal and the effect of metal loss in the effective-medium properties of wire media formed by an array of connected rods at infrared frequencies. Using homogenization techniques, it is demonstrated that the plasmonic properties of metals may enable the design of artificial plasmas that mimic more closely the behavior of a continuous isotropic medium with negative permittivity. It is shown that when the plasmonic properties of the metal are dominant, the electrical length of the unit cell may be a very small fraction of the operating wavelength near the plasma frequency of the wire medium and that the spatial dispersion effects may be relatively weak. In addition, we investigate the possibility operating the artificial plasma in the regime $\text{Re}\left\{\epsilon \right\}=-1$ to obtain a superlensing effect at infrared frequencies analogous to that characteristic of the silver lens.

• Received 29 August 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.79.035118