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Homogenization of Amorphous Media

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Amorphous Nanophotonics

Part of the book series: Nano-Optics and Nanophotonics ((NON))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the homogenization of two-phase mixtures. The materials that form the mixture are assumed to be isotropic but they can be plasmonic (having negative real part of the permittivity) and/or lossy (complex-valued). The geometrical arrangements that are analyzed can be regular, disordered, or totally random morphologies. Classical mixing rules are presented and applied to various type of mixtures, and their predictions are tested and compared against computational simulations. Among the phenomena that are discussed in detail are the emergence of resonances and complex-valued responses from lossless components, as well as the effect of mixing process on the dispersive behavior of materials. Such homogenization of mixtures is a valuable means to assign effective properties to amorphous nanophotonic materials with sufficiently small unit cells, since it helps in analyzing emerging physical phenomena, and makes such materials available in the design process of a functional device.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Professor Christian Mätzler for providing the dry snow data in Fig. 3.2, and Dr. Kimmo Kärkkäinen for the computational data for Figs. 3.7–3.9.

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Correspondence to Ari Sihvola .

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Sihvola, A., Wallén, H. (2013). Homogenization of Amorphous Media. In: Rockstuhl, C., Scharf, T. (eds) Amorphous Nanophotonics. Nano-Optics and Nanophotonics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32475-8_3

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