Introducing a general method for solving electromagnetic radiation problem in an arbitrary linear medium

Abstract: Numerical transfer matrices have been widely used in the study of wave propagation and scattering. These may be viewed as descretizations of a recently introduced fundamental notion of transfer matrix which admits a representation in terms of the evolution operator for an effective non-unitary quantum system. We use the fundamental transfer matrix to develop a general method for the solution of the problem of radiation of an oscillating source in an arbitrary, possibly non-homogenous, anisotropic, and active or lossy linear medium. This allows us to obtain an analytic solution of this problem for an oscillating source located in the vicinity of a planar collection of possibly anisotropic and active/lossy point scatterers such as those modeling a two-dimensional photonic crystal.