Fundamental properties of surface waves in lossless stratified structures

This paper is focused on dispersive properties of lossless planar layered structures with media having positive constitutive parameters (permittivity and permeability), possibly uniaxially anisotropic. Some of these properties have been derived in the past with reference to specific simple layered structures, and are here established with more general proofs, valid for arbitrary layered structures with positive parameters. As a first step, a simple application of the Smith chart to the relevant dispersion equation is used to prove that evanescent (or plasmonic-type) waves cannot be supported by layers with positive parameters. The main part of the paper is then focused on a generalization of a common graphical solution of the dispersion equation, in order to derive some general properties about the behaviour of the wavenumbers of surface waves as a function of frequency. The wavenumbers normalized with respect to frequency are shown to be always increasing with frequency, and at high frequency they tend to the highest refractive index in the layers. Moreover, two surface waves with the same polarization cannot have the same wavenumber at a given frequency. The low-frequency behaviours are also briefly addressed. The results are derived by means of a suitable application of Foster's theorem.