Suppression of left-handed properties in disordered metamaterials
  We study the effect of disorder on the effective magnetic response of composite left-handed metamaterials and their specific properties such as negative refraction. We show that relatively weak disorder in the split-ring resonators can reduce and even completely eliminate the frequency domain where the composite material demonstrates the left-handed properties. We introduce the concept of the order parameter to describe novel physics of this effect. 
Alexander A. Zharov, Ilya V. Shadrivov, and Yuri S. Kivshar