Experimental study of electromagnetic wave scattering from a gyrotropic gaseous plasma column

ORAL

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the controlled scattering of incident transverse-electric electromagnetic waves from a gyrotropic magnetized plasma cylindrical discharge. Scattered electromagnetic waves can bend left and right by changing the external magnetic field of a plasma rod. Measured scattered wavefronts are in good agreement with electromagnetic simulations. A gyrotropic response is observed for incident wave frequencies ranging from 3.5 to 5.6 GHz for conditions corresponding to a ratio of cyclotron frequency to plasma frequency around 0.16. The observation of a gyrotropic response from cylindrical plasma discharges paves the way for their use as building blocks for future devices such as magnetized plasma photonic crystals, topological insulators, plasma metamaterials, non-reciprocal waveguide structures, and other devices, which require a tunable gyrotropic response from centimeter to meter-scale materials with application-specific geometry.

*This research is partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through a MURI with Dr. Mitat Birkan as Program Manager. J.A.R. acknowledges the support of the U.S. DoE under Award No. DE-SC0019323 and L.S.H. acknowledges the support of the Stanford France Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Publication: Article published in Applied Physics Letters 120, 223101 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0095038

Presenters

  • Luc S Houriez

    • Stanford University

Authors

  • Luc S Houriez

    • Stanford University
  • Hossein Mehrpour Bernety

    • Stanford University
  • Jesse A Rodriguez

    • Stanford University
  • Benjamin Wang

    • Stanford Univ
  • Mark A Cappelli

    • Stanford University