This study is focused on the dispersion properties of a wire medium formed by a rectangular lattice of parallel wires at frequencies close to its plasma frequency. While the effective medium theory predicts isotropic behavior of transverse magnetic (TM) waves in the structure, numerical simulations reveal noticeable anisotropic properties. This anisotropy is dependent on the lattice rectangularity and reaches over 6% and over 75% along and across the wires respectively for thick wires with radii about 20 times smaller than the smallest period. This conclusion is confirmed by line-of-current approximation theory. The revealed anisotropy effect is observed when the wavelength at the plasma frequency is comparable to the period of the structure. The effect vanishes in the case of extremely thin wires. A dispersion relation for TM waves in the vicinity of the $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point is obtained in a closed form. This provides an analytical description of the anisotropy effect.

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• Metamaterials
• Photonic crystals
• Finite-element method
• Symmetries in condensed matter