Study of stratified dielectric slab medium structures using pseudo-spectral time domain (PSTD) algorithm

A planar stratified dielectric slab medium, which is an interesting problem in optics and geophysics, is studied using a pseudo-spectral time-domain (PSTD) algorithm. Time domain electric fields and frequency domain propagation characteristics of both single and periodic dielectric slab-layer structures are analyzed. Results show that this method matches satisfactorily the Nyquist sampling theorem in terms of spatial discretization. By comparing the given results, it is found that the PSTD method outperforms the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method in general, especially in terms of the locations of critical frequencies and coarseness in spatial discretization.