An invisible medium for circularly polarized electromagnetic waves

TL;DR

This paper explores conditions for reflectionless transmission of circularly polarized electromagnetic waves at a boundary with an isotropic chiral medium, proposing a novel circular polarizing beam splitter based on this effect.

Contribution

It introduces a no reflection condition for circularly polarized waves at a boundary with an isotropic chiral medium and proposes a practical application as a beam splitter.

Findings

Circularly polarized waves can be transmitted without reflection under specific conditions.

Equal wave impedance and wavenumber lead to reflectionless transmission for one polarization.

A circular polarizing beam splitter can be realized using this no reflection principle.

Abstract

We study the no reflection condition for a planar boundary between vacuum and an isotropic chiral medium. In general chiral media, elliptically polarized waves incident at a particular angle satisfy the no reflection condition. When the wave impedance and wavenumber of the chiral medium are equal to the corresponding parameters of vacuum, one of the circularly polarized waves is transmitted to the medium without reflection or refraction for all angles of incidence. We propose a circular polarizing beam splitter as a simple application of the no reflection effect.