The emphasis placed on the novel properties and application potential of metamaterials in recent years has increased research interest in understanding the interaction between these composite structures and electromagnetic radiation. Such an interaction can be conveniently characterized using homogenization methods, which describe metamaterials as bulk homogeneous materials with certain effective parameters. In contrast to natural materials, the size of the lattice constant in these composite structures is typically only moderately smaller than the wavelength and consequently the derivation of the homogenized description must duly take into account spatial dispersion effects.
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