Nonlocal (spatial-dispersion) effects in multilayered metamaterials composed
of periodic stacks of alternating, deeply subwavelength dielectric layers are
known to be negligibly weak. Counterintuitively, under certain critical
conditions, weak nonlocality may build up strong boundary effects that are not
captured by conventional (local) effective-medium models based on simple mixing
formulas. Here, we show that this phenomenon can be fruitfully studied and
understood in terms of error propagation in the iterated maps of the trace and
anti-trace of the optical transfer matrix of the multilayer. Our approach
effectively parameterizes these peculiar effects via remarkably simple and
insightful closed-form expressions, which enable direct identification of the
critical parameters and regimes. We also show how these boundary effects can be
captured by suitable nonlocal corrections.
@unpublished{Castaldi_2017et,
author = {Castaldi, Giuseppe and Al\`u, Andrea and Galdi, Vincenzo},
title = {Elucidating the boundary effects of weak nonlocality in multilayered dielectric metamaterials},
year = {2017},
preprint = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.08496}
}