Characteristics of propagation of electromagnetic waves in slab waveguide structures comprising chiral and left-handed materials

Abstract

Abstract Characteristics of guided modes in slab waveguide structures which consist of chiral materials and left handed materials (LHMs) are analytically presented. We concentrate our study on chiral nihility materials, in which the permittivity and permeability are simultaneously zero.Two waveguide structures are studied in details.The first one is a symmetricslab waveguides in which the core consists of chiral nihility and the claddingsare left-handed meta-materialswhereas the second one is a symmetric slab waveguide in which the claddings are chiral nihility materials and the core layer is negative index materials. The dispersion equation of an asymmetric three-layered slab waveguide in which all layers are chiral materialsis presented. Then, the dispersion equation of a symmetric one is derived. Forodd and even guided modes, the dispersion equations, normalized cutoff frequencies, electromagnetic fields and energy flow of right-handed and left-handed circularly polarized (RCP and LCP) modes are derived and plotted. Numerical results of guided low-order modes areprovided. Some novel features such as abnormal dispersion curves in the chiral nihility waveguides are found.