A Floquet-Bloch Decomposition of Maxwell's Equations Applied to Homogenization

Using Bloch waves to represent the full solution of Maxwell’s equations in periodic media, we study the limit where the material’s period becomes much smaller than the wavelength. It is seen that for steady-state fields, only a few of the Bloch waves contribute to the full solution. Effective material parameters can be explicitly represented in terms of dyadic products of the mean values of the non-vanishing Bloch waves, providing a new means of homogenization. The representation is valid for an arbitrary wave vector in the first Brillouin zone.