Reflected and transmitted powers of arbitrarily polarized plane waves at interface between chiral and achiral media**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61431010 and 61501350) and the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB340203).

Abstract

A study has been made on the reflected and transmitted powers generated when an arbitrarily polarized plane wave impinges at a planar interface separating an isotropic achiral medium (IAM) and an isotropic chiral medium (ICM). It follows that the theoretical formulas are derived for the normalized reflection and transmission powers from an IAM–ICM interface for an arbitrary polarized incident wave, and those at an ICM–IAM interface for right-hand circularly polarized (RCP) or left-hand circularly polarized (LCP) incident wave are also obtained. The behavior of the reflected and transmitted waves in different cases is studied, and the dependence of the reflection/transmission of the incident wave on the incident angle and the parameters of the media is investigated in detail. Our numerical results show that high transmission is exhibited under the impedance matching condition and the incident wave can be split into two waves of the same circular polarization state in the case of the ICM–IAM interface, which indicates that circular polarizing beam splitter is achieved.