Calculating the electromagnetic characteristics of bifacial optical nanomaterials

Abstract

We introduce a formalism that describes the interaction of light with bifacial optical nanomaterials. They are artificial noncentrosymmetric materials in which counter-propagating waves behave differently. We derive electromagnetic material parameters for uniaxial crystalline media in terms of the complex transmission and reflection coefficients of a single layer of the constituent nanoscatterers, which makes the numerical evaluation of these parameters very efficient. In addition, we present generalized Fresnel coefficients for such bifacial nanomaterials and investigate the fundamental role of higher-order electromagnetic multipoles on the bifaciality. We find that two counter-propagating waves in the material must experience the same refractive index, but they can have dramatically different wave impedances. The use of our model in practice is demonstrated with a particular example of a bifacial nanomaterial that exhibits a directional impedance matching to the surrounding medium.