Electromagnetic metamaterials are artificial composites, containing resonators and exhiniting opticalproperties which do not exist in a natural state. This thesis is dedicated to the manufacturing and thecharacterization of such materials. Metallic core-shell particles (gold or silver core coated with a silicashell) are assembled by the Langmuir-Blodgett technique to form dense monolayer and multilayernetworks. These nanoparticles play the role of resonators thanks to the presence of the plasmonresonance of the core whereas the silica shell allows a fine control of the distance between themetallic particles. We realized materials whose distance between resonators and metallic fractionvary. The spectrophotometric analyses, in particular reflection at normal incidence, allowed us toextract the optical properties of the materials. We proposed a phenomenological model in which wedefine the permittivity of the effective layer as the permittivity of a homogenous matrix to which aLorentz oscillator is added to describe the presence of the plasmon resonance. We were able toshow experimentally metamaterials with refractive index lower than 1 can be obtained when thefraction of metal in the material is important enough.
