Investigation of the plane wave behavior within bianisotropic media

Various chiral media, both isotropic and anisotropic, are of increasing interest for theoretical and experimental investigation. Isotropic media have been described in detail in Jaggard et al. (1979) and Lindell et al. (1994). The theory of chiral-ferrite media has been presented in Krowne (1993). Plane wave propagation within bianisotropic media has been considered in Viitanen and Lindell (1993) and Tretyakov and Sochava (1994). However, the theory of bianisotropic media where the nondiagonal terms in the chirality tensor and permittivity tensor are not equal to zero has not been presented. It is described in the present paper. It is assumed that the plane harmonic wave propagates along arbitrary direction within the considered media. At first it is necessary to obtain and study the analytical expressions of the wavenumbers for arbitrary direction of wave propagation. Then it is interesting to consider two particular cases: 1) the wave propagation along the bianisotropy axis, 2) the wave propagation normally to the bianisotropy axis