Chiral planar waveguide for guiding single-mode backward wave

Single-mode backward wave is shown to be guided in a planar dielectric waveguide with a strong chiral core. The significant difference of such a waveguide from the traditional one is the guidance of single-mode backward wave, without using negative permittivity and/or negative permeability. In the design, we generalize the idea of total internal reflection to the chiral medium and make a numerical analysis on the reflection with oblique incidence. We deduce rigorously a general solution of incident wave on the boundary of two arbitrary chiral magneto-electric media. We observe that the impedance matching can eliminate the coupling between two eigenwaves in chiral media. With strong chiral core and the matched impedance with cladding, one eigenwave becomes a backward wave and can be guided without transferring to the other eigenwave. If a single-mode propagation condition is satisfied, we will get single-mode backward guided wave. A special interface has been designed to prevent the forward wave entering the waveguide from the source.