Significant enhancement of evanescent spatial harmonics inside the slabs of media with extreme optical anisotropy is revealed. This phenomenon results from the pumping of standing waves and has the feature of being weakly sensitive to the material losses. Such characteristics may enable subwavelength imaging at considerable distances away from the objects.
We compare the behavior of propagating and evanescent light waves in absorbing media with that of electrons in the presence of inelastic scattering. The imaginary part of the dielectric constant results primarily in an exponential decay of a propagating wave, but a phase shift for an evanescent wave. We then describe how the scattering of quantum particles out of a particular coherent channel can be modeled by introducing an imaginary part to the potential in analogy with the optical case. The imaginary part of the potential causes additional scattering which can dominate and actually prevent absorption of the wave for large enough values of the imaginary part. We also discuss the problem of maximizing the absorption of a wave and point out that the existence of a bound state greatly aids absorption. We illustrate this point by considering the absorption of light at the surface of a metal.
There has been significant interest in imaging and focusing schemes that use evanescent waves to beat the diffraction limit, such as those employing negative refractive index materials or hyperbolic metamaterials. The fundamental issue with all such schemes is that the evanescent waves quickly decay between the imaging system and sample, leading to extremely weak field strengths. Using an entropic definition of spot size which remains well defined for arbitrary beam profiles, we derive rigorous bounds on this evanescent decay. In particular, we show that the decay length is only $w / pi e approx 0.12 w$, where $w$ is the spot width in the focal plane, or $sqrt{A} / 2 e sqrt{pi} approx 0.10 sqrt{A}$, where $A$ is the spot area. Practical evanescent imaging schemes will thus most likely be limited to focal distances less than or equal to the spot width.
Structures with heavy-tailed distributions of disorder occur widely in nature. The evolution of such systems, as in foraging for food or the occurrence of earthquakes is generally analyzed in terms of an incoherent series of events. But the study of wave propagation or lasing in such systems requires the consideration of coherent scattering. We consider the distribution of wave energy inside 1D random media in which the spacing between scatterers follow a Levy $alpha$-stable distribution characterized by a power-law decay with exponent $alpha$. We show that the averages of the intensity and logarithmic intensity are given in terms of the average of the logarithm of transmission and the depth into the sample raised to the power $alpha$. Mapping the depth into the sample to the number of scattering elements yields intensity statistics that are identical to those found for Anderson localization in standard random media. This allows for the separation for the impacts of disorder distribution and wave coherence in random media.
Based on the concept of complementary media, we propose a novel design which can enhance the electromagnetic wave scattering cross section of an object so that it looks like a scatterer bigger than the scale of the device. Such a ``superscatterer is realized by coating a negative refractive material shell on a perfect electrical conductor cylinder. The scattering field is analytically obtained by Mie scattering theory, and confirmed by full-wave simulations numerically. Such a device can be regarded as a cylindrical concave mirror for all angles.
Waves traveling through random media exhibit random focusing that leads to extremely high wave intensities even in the absence of nonlinearities. Although such extreme events are present in a wide variety of physical systems and the statistics of the highest waves is important for their analysis and forecast, it remains poorly understood in particular in the regime where the waves are highest. We suggest a new approach that greatly simplifies the mathematical analysis and calculate the scaling and the distribution of the highest waves valid for a wide range of parameters.