Electromagnetic Properties Of The Planar Waveguide With Left-Handed Materials

The Left-Handed Materials (LHMs) is a kind of artificial electromagnetic (EM) materials which exhibit simultaneous negative permittivity and negative permeability in certain frequencies, and thus would posses striking properties, such as negative refraction, inverse Doppler shift, reverse Goos-Hanchen shift and reversed Cerenkov radiation. Such diversity of the exotic properties have led the LHM itself to be one of the current focus of the international academic research, and the LHMs would have a promising widely application in optics and many other fields in the long run.In this paper, we investigate the electromagnetic properties of the planar waveguides with LHMs. Firstly, we overview the theory origin, the distinct electromagnetic effect, the theory basis of the LHMs as well as the fabrication of these artificial materials. And then the electromagnetism theory of the slab waveguides and the transfer matrix method are discussed and applied to the analysis of the waveguides with LHMs core. After these preparations, we analyze the guided modes in the four-layer waveguides with LHMs layer. On the other hand, the properties of evanescent waves in four-layer planar waveguides with anisotropic metamaterials layer are investigated. We derive the characteristic equations and the analytical expression of the corresponding energy flux of this waveguides. Different enhancement effects of evanescent wave are analyzed in terms of different anisotropic cases, especially when the optical axis of the anisotropic metamaterial having an arbitrary angle with the interface.Our works indicate that the four-layer planar waveguide with left-handed material possess several unusual vital properties of the guided modes. Numerical results indicate that the amplitude of evanescent waves could be enhanced exponentially with the LHMs compared to those without the LHMs, but eventually saturates when the complete surface polariton mode is established. Such properties of the LHMs, including the enhancement effect of the evanescent waves and abnormal guided modes, may have potential applications in many corresponding fields and enhance the performance of the optical devices those base on evanescent waves.