The Eigen Theory of Electromagnetic Waves in Complex Media

Abstract

Since J. C. Maxwell presented the electromagnetic field equations in 1873, the existence of electromagnetic waves has been verified in various medium (Kong, 1986; Monk, 2003). But except for Helmholtz’s equation of electromagnetic waves in isotropic media, the laws of propagation of electromagnetic waves in anisotropic media are not clear to us yet. For example, how many electromagnetic waves are there in anisotropic media? How fast can these electromagnetic waves propagate? Where are propagation direction and polarization direction of the electromagnetic waves? What are the space patterns of these waves? Although many research works were made in trying to deduce the equations of electromagnetic waves in anisotropic media based on the Maxwell’s equation (Yakhno, 2005, 2006; Cohen, 2002; Haba, 2004), the explicit equations of electromagnetic waves in anisotropic media could not be obtained because the dielectric permittivity matrix and magnetic permeability matrix were all included in these equations, so that only local behaviour of electromagnetic waves, for example, in a certain plane or along a certain direction, can be studied. On the other hand, it is a natural fact that electric and magnetic fields interact with each other in classical electromagnetics. Therefore, even if most of material studies deal with the properties due to dielectric polarisation, magneitc materials are also capable of producing quite interesting electro-magnetic effects (Lindellm et al., 1994). From the bi-anisotropic point of view, magnetic materials can be treated as a subclass of magnetoelectric materials. The linear constitutive relations linking the electric and magnetic fields to the electric and magnetic displacements contain four dyadics, three of which have direct magnetic contents. The magnetoelectric coupling has both theoretical and practical significance in solid state physics and materials science. Though first predicted by Pierre Curie, magnetoeletric coupling was originally through to be forbidden because it violates time-reversal symmetry, until Laudau and Lifshitz (Laudau & Lifshitz, 1960) pointed out that time reversal is not a symmetry operation in some magnetic crystal. Based on this argument, Dzyaloshinskii (Dzyaloshinskii, 1960) predicted that magnetoelectric effect should occur in antiferromagnetic crystal Cr2O3, which was verified experimentally by Astrov (Astrov, 1960). Since then the magnetoelectric coupling has been observed in single-phase materials where simultaneous electric and magnetic ordering coexists, and in two-phase composites where the participating phase are pizoelectric and piezomagnetic (Bracke & Van Vliet,1981; Van Run et al., 1974) . Agyei and Birman (Agyei & Birman, 1990) carried out a detailed