Dear Steven, in the release notes you write that now Meep supports anisotropic dispersive materials. The Meep reference says that the sigma-conductivity tensor must be symmetric. But as I know its not the case for magnetised plasmas. For example in the cold collisionless plasma at a fixed frequency the susceptibility matrix is Hermitian. Which implies that the Meep sigma-conductivity matrix must be anti-symmetric (proportional to the imaginary part of the susceptibility matrix). So it seems to be impossible to model such a medium in a narrow bandwidth as you suggest.
On the other hand may be it is possible to write a dispersion relation for certain types of plasma waves in the Lorentzian form as you suggest. That is we will have different media for different wave types. But in general it is impossible to isolate and simulate (excite) one specific wave type, others will also be present in the simulation. Examples are the ordinary and extraordinary waves in a cold collisionless magnetised plasma. So it seems to be also impossible to model such a medium by means of your dispersion mechanism in Meep. Am I get it right, it is still not possible to model an arbitrary medium in Meep in this release? Thanks in advance for your answer. And thank you for the great software you create. --- Roman Zubov, Polar Geophysical Institute
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