Birefringence by a smoothly inhomogeneous locally isotropic medium

Abstract
Propagation of an electromagnetic wave in a layered locally isotropic medium is considered. An effective birefringence n-n∼(λ/a)2 for the ∥ and ⊥ eigenpolarizations appears, and the corresponding phase difference cphi-cphi∼(λ/a) is calculated in this paper. An alternative method of calculation of the higher (∼λ/a) WKB corrections for the one-dimensional Schrödinger problem is developed as a by-product of the work.

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