Frustrated total reflection: The double-prism revisited

Abstract

Geometrical optics prohibits any penetration of light into an optically rarer medium in the case of total reflection. When sandwiching, however, the rarer medium between optically denser media, a transmitted beam can be observed in the third medium. The experiment is often realized by a double-prism arrangement [1]; the effect is called frustrated total reflection due to the enforced transmission. Amazingly, the reflected and transmitted beams are shifted with respect to geometrical optics as conjectured by Newton [2] and experimentally confirmed by Goos-Hänchen 250 years later [3]. However, inconsistent results on the spatial shifts have been reported [4-7]. Here we report on measurements of the Goos-Hänchen shift in frustrated total reflection with microwaves. We found an unexpected influence of the beamwidth and angle of incidence on the shift. Our results are not in agreement with both previous experiments [6,7] and theoretical predictions [8-10]. The topic of frustrated total reflection is important for both fundamental research and applications [11-13].

Lateral Displacement of an Electromagnetic Beam Reflected From a Grounded Indefinite Uniaxial Slab

“…The concept of Goos-Hänchen lateral shift has been expanded to partial reflection at arbitrary incident angle [10][11][12][13]. In order to get a large or negative lateral shift, many attempts have been made with various materials and configurations, such as dielectric slabs [14][15][16][17], metal surfaces [18][19][20], dielectricchiral surface [21], multilayered structures [22], metallic gratings [23], and photonic crystals [24].…”

Goos-Hänchen shift from an anisotropic metamaterial slab

“…Due to unusual permeability and permittivity of metamaterial, many unusual properties and potential applications have been found [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. When a wave is reflected at the interface of two different media, there is a lateral shift for reflected waves, just well known as the Goos-Hänchen effect(or the lateral shift) [10][11][12][13]. One of the interesting phenomena is that when a wave impings on isotropic metamaterial, a negative Hänchen shift will occur [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Universal tunneling time for all fields

“…where I 0 is the the signal intensity at the barriers front, κ is the imaginary wave number, c, n 1 and n 2 are velocity of light, the refractive indices of the air and of the fibers, respectively, and θ represents the angle of incidence above the critical angle of total reflection [16]. It is interesting that evanescent modes and tunneling particles are non observables.…”

“…In FTIR there is a shift (coined Goos-Hänchen shift) between the incident and the reflected beam as already conjectured by Newton 300 years ago. The length of this shift amounts to about one wavelength [16]. This shift along the boundary of the first prism corresponds to the universal tunneling time of one oscillation time [1,2].…”

“…Zero time tunneling and the virtual nature of evanescent modes as well as the barrier interaction time become most obvious in FTIR with double prisms as shown in Refs. [3,16,17]. A modern technical device based on FTIR is illustrated in Fig.1.…”