Experimental study of photonic crystals consisting of E-negative and mu-negative materials

E-negative (ENG) and mu-negative (MNG) materials are successfully fabricated by using composite right/left-handed transmission line. The ENG and MNG materials are opaque in experiments, but the completely tunneling phenomenon occurs in the ENG-MNG pair, if the wave impedance and the effective phase shift of ENG and MNG materials are under the conditions of match, respectively. We experimentally confirmed that the photonic crystals consisting of ENG and MNG materials can possess left-handed propagation modes and right-handed propagation modes within forbidden gaps. At the same time, the Bragg gaps for the band-gap indices m=+/-1 and the zero effective phase (zero-Phi(eff)) gaps were also observed. The experimental results agree extremely well with the simulations.