Properties of mid-infrared Bloch surface waves at the interface of air and Y2O3 and B4C layers based truncated one dimensional ternary photonic crystal

Theoretical investigation of electromagnetic band structure, surface modes (or Bloch modes) and its localization properties at the interface of air and truncated one dimensional ternary photonic crystal (1D-TPC) formed by right handed materials has been presented. The analysis is done in mid infrared frequency domain for the case of transverse magnetic (TM) polarized electromagnetic waves (EMWs) incident onto the structure. The formalism is developed using 2 × 2 transfer matrix method (TMM) and employing the continuity condition of tangential electric and magnetic fields at each interface of the stratified structure surface mode field profile, decay length and energy distribution is computed. It is found that modes which are located in the mid of photonic band gaps (PBGs) are strongly bounded to the interface while modes which are localized close to the edges of the PBGs are loosely bounded to the interface. It has been examined that by varying the thickness of the add layer (d
_c
) one can confine the surface modes in PBGs and with increase in d
_c
the frequency of surface modes decreases at constant normalized parallel wave vector (β).