Light interaction with multilayer arbitrary anisotropic structure: an explicit analytical solution and application for subwavelength imaging

A systematic analytical approach to simulate the propagation of electromagnetic plane waves in multilayer anisotropic structures, where the layers can have arbitrary oriented optical axis, is presented. The explicit expressions for the vector polarizations of electric and magnetic fields inside a randomly oriented anisotropic medium are derived. The developed algorithm operates with analytic 4 x 4 matrices to calculate the transmission and reflection coefficients. This algorithm is suitable to investigate the near-field/far-field electromagnetic wave interaction at any angle of incidence for numerous intriguing applications. The procedure is applied to design anisotropic single and multilayer lenses for subwavelength imaging. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America