EE 383V Homework #1

Due 09/20/2017 Wednesday, 11:59pm CT

Early submission deadline 09/16/2017 Saturday, 1pm CT (+10pts)
(Electronic Submission to Canvas)
Problem 1. Phasor notation (30pts)
Consider a right-hand circularly polarized plane wave normally incident from free-space ( < 0)
onto a half-space ( > 0) consisting of a perfect electrical conductor ( = 0 everywhere inside).
Let the incident electric field be of the form

(, ) = 0 ( + ) 0 .
Use the phasor notation (i.e. suppress the time-dependent component) and find the phasor
solution to the following questions:
(a) Find the reflected electric and magnetic fields in the region < 0, using the boundary
condition of a perfect electrical conductor.

(b) Find the total electric and magnetic fields in the region < 0
(c) Compute the Poynting vectors for the total fields for the region < 0. What is the
polarization of the reflected wave?
Problem 2. Gyrotropic dielectrics (20pts)
The permittivity tensor for a gyrotropic dielectric (magneto-optical) material is
0
[] = [ 0].
0 0 1

Show that the transformations

+ = , + = ,
= + , = + ,
allow the relation between vector and to be written as
+ +
[ ] = [ ] [ ]

where [ ] is a 3x3 diagonal matrix. Find the matrix elements in [ ]? Using this result to
simplify the wave equation (2 + 2 [] = 0) for two polarizations [+ , 0, 0] and
[0, , 0] respectively, and find the propagation constants for the two polarizations at frequency
.