Spin–Orbital Coupling and Conservation Laws in Electromagnetic Waves Propagating through Chiral Media

Abstract

This study examines the characteristics of the electromagnetic waves that propagate through an unbounded space filled with a homogeneous isotropic chiral medium. The resulting characters are compared to those of the electromagnetic waves propagating through an achiral free space. To this goal, we form energy conservation laws for key bilinear parameters in a chiral case. Due to a nonzero medium chirality, conservation laws turn out to contain extra terms that are linked to the spin–orbit coupling, which is absent for an achiral case. In this way, we identified where the neat hierarchy exhibited by the achiral case among the key bilinear parameters is destroyed by a medium chirality. As an example, we took a plane wave for the chiral case to evaluate those bilinear parameters. Resultantly, the conservation laws for a chiral case are found to reveal inconsistencies among several bilinear parameters that constitute the conservation laws, thereby prompting us to establish partial remedies for formulating proper wave-propagation problems. Therefore, adequate applications of boundary conditions are found to be necessary after examining typical problems available from the literature.