Collective electromagnetic response of discrete metamaterial systems

Abstract: We develop a general formalism to describe the interactions between a discrete set of plasmonic resonators mediated by the electromagnetic field. The resulting system of equations for closely-spaced meta-atoms represents a cooperative metamaterial response and we find that collective interactions between asymmetric split-ring resonators arranged in a 2D lattice explains the recent experimental observations of system-size dependent narrowing of the transmission resonance linewidth. We further show that this cooperative narrowing depends sensitively on the lattice spacing.