Recently, industrial and academic researchers have developed a keen interest in complex composite materials since they can exhibit unusual and, when properly designed, beneficial electromagnetic properties. An example of this is a chiral, or optically active, material which macroscopically is a large collection of tiny, handed inclusions randomly embedded in a host medium. The objective of this research project is the development of a deterministic capability for macroscopically characterizing both naturally-occurring and artificially-created chiral materials. This capability is crucial in the design of these materials to optimize their beneficial electromagnetic characteristics. This Research Initiative Award project will address this issue through a comprehensive program of research which will combine computational methods with analytical models and techniques to ascertain the effective constitutive parameters. The time-consuming and computationally intensive numerical simulations will be assisted by the use of both equivalent boundary condition models and the implementation of parallel computational algorithms in order to produce results which are both meaningful and temporally tractable. Once the effective descriptors are known they will be applied to a wide range of problems such as optical fibers, devices and waveguides in the optical frequency bands and absorbers and micropatch antenna substrates at microwave frequencies. Finally, experimental measurements will be performed to both validate these methods and results, and to evaluate the accuracy of the macroscopic models.
