Polarization Dependence of the Reflectance and Transmittance of Anisotropic Metamaterials

Due to the interference effect, the reflectance and transmittance of an arbitrary linearly polarized wave cannot be fully described by the reflectance and transmittance of transverse electric and transverse magnetic waves. In this work, the polarization dependence of reflectance and transmittance for anisotropic metamaterials is examined. The explicit mathematical relationship between the Fresnel coefficients and the reflectance (or transmittance) for a given polarization angle is derived. A method is presented that can be used to obtain the reflectance (or transmittance) for any polarization angle from three other polarizations. Several different anisotropic metamaterials are numerically investigated with the finite-difference time-domain technique to elucidate the polarization dependence of reflectance or transmittance. The reflectance and transmittance obtained from the three-polarization-angle method are in agreement with those from the rigorous numerical simulation.