Finite difference time domain (FDTD) analysis of an artificially-synthesized absorbing medium

In this paper, we investigate an artificially-synthesized absorbing medium by using the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) technique. The artificial medium is composed of a doubly-periodic array of lossy electric and magnet ic material blocks (i.e., mu and epsilon media arranged in a checkerboard c onfiguration). We analyze its reflection characteristics for both normal an d oblique incidence cases. It is demonstrated that, if properly designed, t he reflection characteristics of the checkerboard are considerably superior to those of a uniform epsilon = mu material of the same thickness. A multi -layer checkerboard is used to truncate a waveguide in the FDTD simulation; the result is comparable to that of an unsplit Perfectly Matched Layer (PM L) with the same number of layers.