Propagation of Photon in Multilayer Anisotropic Metamaterials

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the propagation properties of polarized photons transmitting through a multilayer cavity with anisotropic metamaterials. We find that there are the resonant peaks of transmission appearing for photons polarized in a certain direction transmitting through the cavity with the anisotropic metamaterials having negative elements of the permittivity tensor. The resonant peak of transmission for photons can be achieved by adjusting the thicknesses of the cavity. The frequency of the resonant peak moves to the lower frequency as the thickness of the cavity which is the air in our designed structure increasing for a three layer cavity. The result also shows that we can adjust the resonant peak through changing the layer number. Increasing the layer number the more resonant peaks appear. The three layer system has one resonant peak. The five layer system has two resonant peaks and the seven layer system has three resonant peaks. The cavity number which also is the number of the air layer decides the resonant peaks. Increasing the cavity thickness the space of the resonant peaks will decrease. For a three layer cavity, the resonant peak will appear to a certain cavity thickness when we keep the frequency of the input photon as a constant. As the frequency of the input photon becomes bigger the thickness of the cavity corresponding to the resonant peak becomes smaller. At the same time the resonant peak becomes sharp. The result shows that the transmission is almost invariant with the changing of the thickness of the anisotropic metamaterials. This means the resonant peak is insensitive to the thickness of the anisotropic metamaterials. So the thickness of the cavity (air) is important to the design of the cavity structure. These conclusions will give us some instructions to the design of the cavity structure with the anisotropic metamaterials. The cavity structures with the anisotropic metamaterials have the potential for applying such as filters for photons with certain polarizations.