Perfect Dispersive Medium

Abstract

Dispersion lies at the heart of real-time signal processing systems across the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio to optics. However, the performance and applicability of such systems have been severely plagued by distortions due to the frequency dependent nature of the amplitude response of the dispersive media used for processing. This frequency dependence is a fundamental consequence of the causality constraint, incarnated by Kramers-Kronig relations or, equivalently, by the Bode relations. In order to resolve this issue, we introduce here the concept of a \emph{perfect dispersive medium}, which is a loss-gain medium characterized by a perfectly flat magnitude response along with an arbitrary phase response. This unprecedented property results from equalized electric and magnetic dipole dispersion responses, whence the amplitude and phase of the transmission functions of the isolated loss and gain contributions become the inverse and remain the same, respectively, under reversal of the sign of the imaginary part of the equalized magneto-dielectric polarizability. Such a perfect dispersive medium may be realized in the form of a metamaterial, and the paper demonstrates a corresponding stacked loss-gain metasurface structure for illustration. From a practical standpoint, perfect dispersive media represent a paradigm shift that may propel real-time signal processing technology to a new dimension, with a myriad of novel ultrafast communication, sensing, imaging and instrumentation applications.