Calculating spatiotemporally modulated surfaces: a dynamical differential formalism

Abstract: Electromagnetic waves in a system with a space and time dependent boundary experience both diffraction and Doppler-like frequency conversion. In order to analyse such situations, conventional methods call for either the eigenmodes or the dyadic Green's function in space and time dependent media. Here, we propose a dynamical differential method which does not require either of them. Our method utilises a dynamical coordinate transformation in order to simplify the calculation of the optical response of the space and time dependent system. We reveal that the diffraction symmetry is broken in the presence of traveling-wave type spatiotemporal modulation.