Composite Uniaxial Bianisotropic Chiral Materials Characterization: Comparison of Predicted and Measured Scattering

Abstract

A methodology to extract the effective constitutive parameters of uniaxial bianisotropic chiral (UBC) materials was presented in [1]. While the results of numerical verification studies within that paper were positive, laboratory measurements of these material types seemed warranted for further verification as well as there being no measured scattering results in the literature for this type of material. Consequently, two UBC composite material slabs were fabricated, as described in this paper, by embedding aligned helices within an epoxy host. The scattering from these slabs was measured using a free-space measurement method and compared to that predicted using our methodology in [1]. Very good correspondence was observed in these comparisons and provides convincing evidence that both the methodology in [1] is correct and that effective UBC composite materials can indeed be constructed from periodically aligned helices. An investigation on the degree of mutual coupling between helices in these fabricated slabs is also presented.