  We demonstrate that surface plasmons of a thin metal film interacting with a
periodic array of nano-structures around it can be utilized to make bulk
negative index metamaterials at visible spectrum with simultaneously negative
permittivity and permeability. These surface plasmon driven metamaterials have
high figure of merit and can be tuned arbitrarily to operate at any wavelength
in the visible spectrum and possibly at ultraviolet spectrum. We numerically
demonstrate the idea by a metamaterial structure which exhibits a strong
magnetic response resulting in a negative index of refraction in the green
region of the electromagnetic spectrum at 536nm with a figure of merit of 3.67.
We also demonstrate by simply changing the constituent material only, hence by
modifying the underlying surface plasmon dispersion, that the operating
wavelength of the structure can be blue-shifted to the violet region at 406nm
with a figure of merit of 2.27. In contrast to the fishnet-structure based
approaches for visible metamaterials, our proposed approach offers a more
frequency scalable way of achieving negative index of refraction in the visible
and possibly at ultraviolet wavelengths with high figure of merit.
