Microwave near-field helicity and its role in the matter-field interaction

Abstract

In the preceding paper, we have shown analytically that in a source-free subwavelength region of microwave fields there exist the field structures with local coupling between the time-varying electric and magnetic fields differing from the electric-magnetic coupling in regular free-space electromagnetic waves. As a source of such near fields, there is a small quasi-2D ferrite disk with the magnetic-dipolar-mode (MDM) spectra. The near fields originated from a MDM ferrite particle are characterized by topologically distinctive structures of power-flow vortices, non-zero helicity, and a torsion degree of freedom. In this paper, we present numerical and experimental studies on the microwave near-field helicity and its role in the matter-field interaction. We show that one can distinguish different microwave near-field-helicity parameters for different permittivities of dielectric samples loading a ferrite-disk sensor. We analyze a role of topological structures of the fields on the helicity properties. We demonstrate dependence of the MDM spectra and the near-field-helicity parameters from the enantiomeric properties of the loading samples.