ANALYSIS OF PROPAGATION AND POLARIZATION CHARACTERISTICS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES THROUGH NONUNIFORM MAGNETIZED PLASMA SLAB USING PROPAGATOR MATRIX METHOD

An analytical technique referred to as the propagator matrix method (PMM) is presented to study the problem of electromagnetic (EM) waves interacting with the nonuniform magnetized plasma. In this method, the state vector is proposed to describe the characteristics of eigen waves in anisotropic medium, and state vectors at two different locations are related with each other by the propagator matrix. This method can be used to deal with the phenomenon of the transformation of EM wave polarization induced by anisotropic magnetized plasma, besides the conventional propagation characteristics through plasma slab, which overcomes the drawback of other analytical methods introduced in former studies. The EM problem model considered in this work is a steady-state, two-dimensional, nonuniform magnetized plasma slab with arbitrary magnetic declination angle, which is composed of a number of subslabs. Each subslab has a fixed electron density, and the overall density profile across the whole slab follows any practical distribution function. Based on PMM, a significant feature of strong transformation of EM wave polarization is addressed when an incident wave normally projects on the slab, which leads to the reflected or transmitted waves containing two kinds of waves, i.e., the co-polarized wave and the cross-polarized wave. The effects of varying the plasma parameters on the reflected and transmitted powers of co-polarization and cross-polarization, as well as the absorptive power for the typical bi-exponential density profile are investigatedin in detail, which provides a certain reference to various plasma technologies such as plasma stealth and communications through re-entry plasma sheath.