Composite chiral-ferrite media, with the introduction of anisotropy into the well-studied chiral materials in order to blend the effects of Faraday rotation and optical activity, have potential applications in chirality management. In the present consideration, based on the concept of characteristic waves and the method of angular spectral expansion, field representations in this class of media are developed. The analysis reveals that the solutions of the source-free Maxwell’s equation for homogeneous composite chiral-ferrite media can be represented in sum-integral forms of the circular cylindrical vector wave functions in isotropic media. The addition theorem of vector wave functions for composite chiral-ferrite media can be derived from that of vector wave functions for isotropic media. An application of the present theory in scattering is presented to show how to use these formulations in a practical way.

• Received 28 March 1994

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.50.4107