J. Mater. Sci. Technol. ›› 2019, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (11): 2463-2469.DOI: 10.1016/j.jmst.2019.07.015

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Negative permittivity derived from inductive characteristic in the percolating Cu/EP metacomposites

Kai Suna, Jiahao Xina, Yaping Lia, Zhongyang Wangbc, Qing Houd*(), Xiaofeng Lia, Xinfeng Wua, Runhua Fanab**(), Kwang Leong Choye*()   

  1. aCollege of Ocean Science and Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China
    bKey Laboratory for Liquid-Solid Structural Evolution and Processing of Materials (Ministry of Education), Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China
    cDepartment of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 119077, Singapore
    dDepartment of Chemistry,University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ, UK
    eUCL Institute for Materials Discovery, University College London, London, WC1E 7JE, UK
  • Received:2019-05-07 Revised:2019-06-17 Accepted:2019-06-18 Online:2019-11-05 Published:2019-10-21
  • Contact: Hou Qing,Fan Runhua,Leong Choy Kwang
  • About author:

    1The authors equally contributed to this work.

Abstract:

Recently, increasing attention has been concentrated on negative permittivity with the development of the emerging metamaterials composed of periodic array structures. However, taking facile preparation into consideration, it is important to achieve negative permittivity behavior based on materials’ intrinsic properties rather than their artificially periodic structures. In this paper, we proposed to fabricate the percolating composites with copper dispersed in epoxy (EP) resin by a polymerization method to realize the negative permittivity behavior. When Cu content in the composites reached to 80 wt%, the conductivity abruptly went up by three orders of magnitudes, suggesting a percolation behavior. Below the percolation threshold, the conductivity spectra conform to Jonscher’s power law; when the Cu/EP composites reached to percolating state, the conductivity gradually reduced in high frequency region due to the skin effect. It is indicated that the conductive mechanism changed from hopping conduction to electron conduction. In addition, the permittivity did not increase monotonously with the increase of Cu content in the vicinity of percolation threshold, due to the presence of leakage current. Meanwhile, the negative permittivity conforming to Drude model was observed above the percolation threshold. Further investigation revealed that there was a constitutive relationship between the permittivity and the reactance. When conductive fillers are slightly above the percolation threshold, the inductive characteristic derived from conductive percolating network leads to the negative permittivity. Such epsilon-negative materials can potentially be applied in novel electrical devices, such as high-power microwave filters, stacked capacitors, negative capacitance field effect transistors and coil-free resonators. In addition, the design strategy based on percolating composites provides an approach to epsilon-negative materials.

Key words: Negative permittivity, Epsilon-negative materials, Percolating composites, Metacomposites, Metamaterials