  In recent years, the concept of metamaterials has offered platforms for
unconventional tailoring and manipulation of the light-matter interaction.
Here, we explore the notion of "static optics", in which the electricity and
magnetism are decoupled and their fields are statically distributed, while
being temporally dynamic. This occurs when both the relative effective
permittivity and permeability attain near-zero values at an operating
frequency. We theoretically investigate some of the unprecedented wave
features, such as unusual radiation characteristics of an emitter embedded in
such epsilon-and-mu-near-zero (EMNZ) media. Using such static-optical medium
one might in principle "open up" and "stretch" the space, and have regions
behaving electromagnetically as "single points" despite being electrically
large. We suggest a possible design for implementation of such structures using
a single dielectric rod inserted in a waveguide operating near its cut-off
frequency, providing the possibility of having electrically large "empty"
volumes to behave as EMNZ static-optical media.
