Plane wave reflection and refraction involving a finitely conducting medium

In this work the structure of electromagnetic field in a lossy conducting medium is studied in detail. The meaning of the complex angle of refraction is explained in terms of real parameters involved in this problem. The concepts are illustrated with a wave refracting from air into pure water at a frequency of 95 GHz and an incidence angle of 60°. The approach is similar to that used to derive refraction in many electromagnetic textbooks, such as Stratton (J. A. Stratton, 1941), which has been cited in many of the textbooks published since. Our results agree with his for the real angle of the equiphase surface of the refracted fields, but we explore further subjects, including the instantaneous and time-averaged Pointing vectors.