Electromagnetic energy sink

The ideal black body fully absorbs all incident rays, that is, all propagating waves created by arbitrary sources. A known idealized realization of the black body is the perfectly matched layer (PML), widely used in numerical electromagnetics. However, ideal black bodies and PMLs do not interact with evanescent fields that exists near any finite-size source, and the energy stored in these fields cannot be harvested. Here, we introduce the concept of the ideal conjugate matched layer (CML), which fully absorbs the energy of both propagating and evanescent fields of sources acting as an ideal sink for electromagnetic energy. Conjugate matched absorbers have exciting application potentials, as resonant attractors of electromagnetic energy into the absorber volume. We derive the conditions on the constitutive parameters of media which can serve as CML materials, numerically study the performance of planar and cylindrical CML and discuss possible realizations of such materials as metal-dielectric composites.