THEORY OF ELECTROMAGNETIC-WAVE PROPAGATION IN SUPERLATTICES WITH OPTICALLY ANISOTROPIC LAYERS

A formalism is developed to find the photon dispersion relations in superlattice systems having layers with low optical symmetry or having magnetic layers. This formalism is an exact solution of the first order Maxwell's equations including all the information for the anisotropic optical response tensors and including the coupling of the TE and TM modes. Based on a 4×4 matrix approach for solving complicated reflection and transmission problems in stratified anisotropic media and employing a plane wave expansion of the field components to take into account the periodicity of the superlattices, the photon dispersion relation can be obtained numerically with a simple algorithm. This result is useful in predicting the absence of certain electromagnetic modes along the superlattice axis, and in identifying observed resonances with a particular excitations of the system. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.