Researchers have turned to the brute-force power of combinatorial chemistry to develop a whole new range of metamaterials. The team behind the approach made an array of metamaterials each containing gold square split-ring resonators. The size of the squares are varied from cell to cell in steps of 25 nm depending on the photon frequency the team wishes to focus upon. Variations in the manufacturing process, should these metamaterials be developed further, will be an issue but there is a huge payoff for anyone who can master their production for photonics applications.

• A combinatorial approach to metamaterials discovery
  E. Plum, K. Tanaka, W. T. Chen, V. A. Fedotov, D. P. Tsai, N. I. Zheludev,
  arXiv.org, 2010.
  http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0391