An artifiicially-synthesized absorbing material composed of a doubly-period
ic array of lossy electric and magnetic media (i.e., an epsilon and mu chec
kerboard) is presented for the truncation of Finite-Difference Time-Domain
(FDTD) lattices in waveguide simulations. It is shown numerically that this
artificially-synthesized material exhibits excellent absorption properties
when used in waveguide simulations, However, unlike the Perfectly Matched
Layer (PML) absorbing medium, the artificially-synthesized medium presented
in this letter does not require any modification of the standard FDTD form
ulation. Numerical examples demonstrate that the FDTD implementation of the
artificially-synthesized absorbing medium is stable as well as computation
ally efficient.