Wave Diffraction by Metamaterial-Coated Wedges: The UAPO Solution for Skew Incidence

The interaction between an electromagnetic plane wave and a metallic wedge coated with a uniform layer made of a double-negative metamaterial is studied by means of the uniform asymptotic physical optics method in the high-frequency range, e.g., at microwave and optical frequencies. The apex angle of the structure is arbitrarily chosen, and the wave is at a skew incidence with respect to the external edge, which is formed by the metamaterial layers covering the wedge faces. The proposed method is built on the scattering integral involving electric and magnetic surface currents as physical optics equivalent sources, and it takes advantage of analytic evaluations. The last step uses a uniform asymptotic procedure to obtain a closed form expression of the diffracted field to be added to the geometrical optics one for computing the total field at the observation point in the neighboring free space. The study also includes a numerical validation of the method.