TE Modal Dispersion in Dielectric Slab Waveguide with Lossy Left-Handed Metamaterial

Copyright © 2013 Hassan S. Ashour. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In this work, we derived the modal dispersion relation for TEm modes for a symmetric slab waveguide constructed from SiO2 dielectric guiding core material with lossy left-handed material (LHM) as cladding and substrate, and the power confinement factor. The dispersion relations and the power confinement factor were numerically solved for a given set of parameters: allowed frequency range; core’s thicknesses; and TEm mode order. We found that the real part of the ef-fective refractive index decreased with thickness and frequency increase. Moreover, the imaginary part (extinction coef-ficient) of the effective refractive index has very small values for all thickness in the frequency ranges, which means the waveguide structure is transparent for the used frequencies. The waveguide structure offers good guiding power for all thickness in the frequency range with low power attenuation. The real part of the effective refractive index increases with the increase of mode order, and the power confinement factor decreases with the increase of mode order