Inhomogeneous Plasmas: On the Reflection and Transmission of Fields of Arbitrary Polarization

摘要

One objective of this paper is to develop a simple numerical procedure to determine the electromagnetic field penetration through a slab many hundreds of wavelengths in thickness of cold plasma with collisions. The electron‐density‐collision frequency profiles may be arbitrary but must contain only a finite number of discontinuities. The solution of this problem leads to a differential equation of the Riccati type. Other objectives are to evaluate exactly the transmission loss through the aforementioned inhomogeneous plasma and to determine the field variation within the plasma slab when the incident field is of arbitrary polarization. This is accomplished by solving the E and H plane incidence problems separately and then employing superposition. The results are in the form of an integral involving the reflection coefficient. The differential equations for the reflection coefficient and the transmission integrals are easily evaluated to practically any desired degree of accuracy by computer. Analytical and numerical results are presented for a plasma half‐space with an exponential electron‐density distribution.