Navin Bhat's Abstract


Canonical polariton method for dispersive and absorptive structured dielectrics
Navin A.R. Bhat and J.E. Sipe, University of Toronto

We present a canonical Hamiltonian formulation for the electromagnetic fields in dispersive and absorptive artificially structured dielectrics which explicitly satisfy the Kramers-Kronig relations. Our method is based on identification of the photonic modes of the entire system, such that the canonical variables are just the photonic modes augmented by medium excitation. This has an advantage over noise-current methods in that existing codes and computational methods for photonic band structures can easily be leveraged to calculate the polaritonic modes while maintaining a Hamiltonian formulation. The dielectric medium is formulated in terms of a Hopfield-type model, in which the physics of the dielectric is intuitively clear. For both the absorptive and transparent regimes we present calculations of the polaritonic band structure and mode fields for realitic artificially structured dielectric media, and describe applications of the method to propagation problems of current interest.

Snowbird, Utah     June 11 - 17, 2005