Artificially soft and hard surfaces in electromagnetics

A transversely corrugated surface as used in corrugated horn antennas represents a soft boundary. A hard boundary is made by using longitudinal corrugations filled with dielectric material. The concept of soft and hard surfaces is treated in detail, considering different geometries. It is shown that both the hard and soft boundaries have the advantage of a polarization-independent reflection coefficient for geometrical optics ray fields, so that a circularly polarized wave is circularly polarized in the same sense after reflection. The hard boundary can be used to obtain strong radiation fields along a surface for any polarization, whereas the soft boundary makes the fields radiated along the surface zero