Electromagnetic resonances and Q factors of a chiral sphere

A study of electromagnetic resonances of an isotropic chiral sphere is presented. The characteristic equation of a chiral sphere, which is complex and transcendental, is obtained by forming solutions of the electromagnetic field for a chiral sphere in terms of the spherical vector wave functions. The characteristic equation is solved by using a computer. Resonant frequencies and Q factors of the first few modes for relative permittivities of two and ten are reported and discussed. These modes are hybrid modes. They are classed as either hybrid electric (HE) modes or hybrid magnetic (HM) modes. Chirality is observed to have a significant effect on the resonances of a sphere.     

Electromagnetic scattering from an arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional homogeneous chiral body

The method of moments technique for analyzing electromagnetic scattering from an arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional homogeneous chiral body is presented based on the combined field integral equations. The body is assumed to be illuminated by a plane wave. The surface equivalence principle is used to replace the body by equivalent electric and magnetic surface currents. These currents radiating in unbounded free space produce the correct scattered field outside. The negatives of these currents produce the correct total internal field, when radiating in an unbounded chiral medium. By enforcing the continuity of the tangential components of the total electric and magnetic fields on the surface of the body, a set of coupled integral equations is obtained for the equivalent surface currents. The surface of the body is modeled using triangular patches. The triangular rooftop vector expansion functions are used for both equivalent surface currents. The coefficients of these expansion functions are obtained using the method of moments. The mixed potential formulation for a chiral medium is developed and used to obtain explicit expressions for the electric and magnetic fields produced by surface currents. Numerical results for bistatic radar cross sections are presented for three chiral scatterers - a sphere, a finite circular cylinder, and a cube.     

A graphical user interface (GUI) for plane-wave scattering from a conducting, dielectric, or chiral sphere

Various numerical techniques have been developed for modeling electromagnetic field propagation in various novel complex media. The validity of these techniques is usually verified by comparison to the exact solutions of canonical problems. Recently, research has focused on chiral media, a subclass of materials known as bianisotropic materials, and numerical techniques have been developed in order to calculate the interaction of electromagnetic fields with chiral objects. One canonical problem for these techniques is plane-wave scattering from a chiral sphere. This work presents a software package that displays and saves the calculated data for the scattering from a chiral, dielectric, or perfectly conducting sphere using a friendly graphical user interface (GUI).