General Optical Propagation and Reflection Normal Incidence

General Optical Propagation and Reflection Normal Incidence 

Consider a light wave propagating along the direction of the helix (z direction). For the locally uniaxial system, the electric displacement D and electric field E are related by the following constitutive equation  

Since we are deahng with a hehcal structure, it is more appropriate to express the fields in terms of right-handed and left-handed circular waves  

To solve the problem, we assume that the solutions of Er and Ei are of the forms 

Quantitative analysis of various propagation modes and their polarization states and other optical parameters can be quite involved, as one can see from the next section. Here we suimnarize some of the pertinent results. 

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