Many-body subradiant excitations in metamaterial arrays: Experiment and theory

Subradiant excitations, originally predicted by Dicke, have posed a long-standing challenge in physics owing to their weak radiative coupling to environment. Here we engineer massive subradiance in planar metamaterial arrays as a spatially extended eigenmode comprising over 1000 metamolecules. By comparing the near- and far-field response in large-scale numerical simulations with those in experimental observations we identify correlated multimetamolecule subradiant states that dominate the total excitation energy. We show that spatially extended many-body subradiance can also exist in plasmonic metamaterial arrays at optical frequencies.