Lateral displacement of a Gaussian beam reflected from a grounded slab with negative permittivity and permeability

A unique negative lateral shift is demonstrated in this letter for a Gaussian beam reflected from a grounded slab with both negative permittivity and permeability, which is distinctly different from a shift caused by a regular grounded slab. The incident beam is modeled as a tapered wave with a Gaussian spectrum. The waves inside and outside the slab are solved analytically from Maxwell's equations by matching the boundary conditions at the interfaces. It is shown that the field values in all regions can be unambiguously determined. Numerical simulations are presented and the field values as well as the power densities are computed for all regions, and a dramatic negative lateral shift is observed when both epsilon and mu are negative. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.