  The search for alternative plasmonic materials with improved optical
properties over the traditional materials like silver and gold could ultimately
lead to the long-awaited, real-life applications of plasmonic devices and
metamaterials. In this work, we show that titanium nitride could perform as an
alternative plasmonic material in the visible wavelength range. We evaluate the
performances of various plasmonic and metamaterial structures with titanium
nitride as a plasmonic component and show that transformation-optics devices
and an important class of metamaterials with hyperbolic dispersion based on TiN
could significantly outperform similar devices based on conventional metals in
the visible wavelengths range.
