  In the past few years, many of the fascinating and previously almost
unconceivable properties predicted for those novel, artificial, man-made
materials, so called metamaterials, were demonstrated to be not only a tangible
reality, but a very useful one. However, plenty of the best achievements in
that newly discovered field are far from having a direct translation to the, in
many aspects more interesting, high frequency range, without being burdened not
only by technological difficulties, but also conceptual ones. Of particular
importance within the realm of optical metamaterials having a negative index of
refraction, often designated negative-index metamaterials (NIM), is the issue
of simultaneously achieving a strong response of the system and low associated
losses. In the present work, we demonstrate the possibility to use hybrid
metal-semiconductor nanowires to obtain an isotropic optical NIM, with very
strong electric and magnetic responses, which exhibits extremely low losses
(about two orders of magnitude better than present optical NIMs).
