Scattering of TE and TM Waves by Inhomogeneities of a 2D Material, Low-Frequency Behavior of the Scattering Amplitude, and Low-Frequency Invisibility

Abstract The propagation of the transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) waves in an effectively 2D isotropic medium is described by Bergmann’s equation of acoustics. We develop a dynamical formulation of the stationary scattering of these waves and explore its application in the study of the low-frequency behavior of the scattering data. Specifically, we introduce a suitable notion of a fundamental transfer matrix for TE and TM waves in 2D. This is an integral operator $\widehat{\mathbf {M}}$ that carries the information about the scattering properties of the medium and admits a Dyson series expansion involving a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian operator. For situations where the inhomogeneities of the medium are confined to a layer of thickness $\ell$, we use the Dyson series for $\widehat{\mathbf {M}}$ to construct the series expansion of the scattering amplitude in powers of $k\ell$, where $k$ is the incident wavenumber. We derive analytic expressions for the leading- and next-to-leading-order terms of this series, verify the effectiveness of their application to a class of exactly solvable models, and use them to study low-frequency invisibility. In particular, we develop a low-frequency cloaking scheme which is applicable for both TE and TM waves. Our results have immediate applications in the study of low-frequency scattering of acoustic waves in a 2D fluid as these waves are also described by Bergmann’s equation.