Skewon-Axion Medium and Soft-and-Hard/DB Boundary Condition

Abstract

The class of skewon-axion media can be defined in a simple and natural manner applying four-dimensional differential-form representation of electromagnetic fields and media. It has been recently shown that an interface of a uniaxial skewon-axion medium acts as a DB boundary requiring vanishing normal components of the D and B vectors. In the present paper a more general skewon-axion medium is considered. It is shown that a planar interface of such a medium acts as a boundary generalizing both soft-and-hard (SH) and DB boundary conditions to SHDB conditions. Reflection of a plane wave from a planar SHDB boundary is studied. It is shown that for the two eigenpolarizations the boundary can be replaced by equivalent PEC or PMC boundaries. The theory is tested with a numerical example.