Light scattering in pseudopassive media with uniformly balanced gain and loss

We introduce a class of metamaterials with uniformly balanced gain and loss associated with complex permittivity and permeability constants. The refractive index of such a balanced pseudopassive metamaterial is real. An unbounded uniform pseudopassive medium has transport characteristics similar to those of its truly passive and lossless counterpart with the same real refractive index. However, bounded pseudopassive samples show some unexpected scattering features which can be further emphasized by including such elements in a photonic structure.