Constitutive Relations for Optically Active Anisotropic Media: A Review

Abstract

The formal description of optical activity (OA) (circular birefringence and dichroism) has more than a 200‐year‐old history, dating back to the pioneering experiments of Arago and Biot. Despite the numerous contributions to it, including several reviews, the formalism of OA has not been treated in a self‐consistent and deductive manner, to the best of authors’ knowledge. Worse, some literature sources report different, apparently contradictory and incompatible, approaches. Willing to provide a general comprehensive review, as well as to clarify all ambiguous points, a unified, systematic, and logical approach to this topic is advanced. By applying a general formal pattern based on the energy conservation principle, the various sets of constitutive relations for optically active media are derived. The relationships allowing for conversions between different sets are presented, in view of their use in the matrix methods for computing the polarimetric responses of stratified structures. The OA tensors of the optically active crystal classes are likewise reported, and the intimate relation existing between crystal point symmetries and physical manifestations of natural OA, namely, rotatory power and longitudinal effect, is discussed. As an illustration, the theoretical developments are applied to the practically important case of planar metamaterial structures.