ANALYSIS OF PROPAGATION AND POLARIZATION CHARACTERISTICS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES THROUGH NONUNIFORM MAGNETIZED PLASMA SLAB USING PROPAGATOR MATRIX METHOD

Abstract

An analytical technique referred to as the propagator ma- trix method (PMM) is presented to study the problem of electromag- netic (EM) waves interacting with the nonuniform magnetized plasma. In this method, the state vector is proposed to describe the characteris- tics of eigen waves in anisotropic medium, and state vectors at two dif- ferent locations are related with each other by the propagator matrix. This method can be used to deal with the phenomenon of the trans- formation of EM wave polarization induced by anisotropic magnetized plasma, besides the conventional propagation characteristics through plasma slab, which overcomes the drawback of other analytical meth- ods introduced in former studies. The EM problem model considered in this work is a steady-state, two-dimensional, nonuniform magne- tized plasma slab with arbitrary magnetic declination angle, which is composed of a number of subslabs. Each subslab has a flxed electron density, and the overall density proflle across the whole slab follows any practical distribution function. Based on PMM, a signiflcant feature of strong transformation of EM wave polarization is addressed when an incident wave normally projects on the slab, which leads to the re- ∞ected or transmitted waves containing two kinds of waves, i.e., the co-polarized wave and the cross-polarized wave. The efiects of vary- ing the plasma parameters on the re∞ected and transmitted powers of co-polarization and cross-polarization, as well as the absorptive power