Three-dimensional electromagnetic metamaterials with non-Maxwellian effective fields

It is commonly assumed that the long-wavelength limit of a metamaterial can always be described in terms of effective permeability and permittivity tensors. This assumption holds true in all metamaterials considered up to now. Here we report that this assumption is false--there exist an entirely new class of metamaterials consisting of multiple interlocking disconnected metal networks, for which the effective long-wavelength theory is local, but the effective field is non-Maxwellian, and possesses much more internal degrees of freedom than effective Maxwellian fields in a homogeneous medium.