THE THEORY OF THE PROPAGATION OF TEM-PULSES IN DISPERSIVE BI-ISOTROPIC SLABS

A survey of the theory of propagation of transient transverse electrom agnetic waves in temporally dispersive, bi-isotropic slabs is given, a nd a novel wave splitting, which completely separates right-going and left-going waves in the dispersive medium, is proposed. The new approa ch leads to a simple scattering relation in terms of wave propagators and single-interface scattering operators only. These temporal integra l operators are related to the four time-dependent susceptibility kern els of the medium through non-linear Volterra equations of the second kind. In a subsequent paper, the corresponding inverse scattering prob lem is addressed on the basis of the new results. (C) 1999 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.