Diffraction by a system consisting of a grating and a layered chiral medium

A rigorous solution method is given to the vector problem of electromagnetic wave diffraction by a system which consists of a periodic grating (which may be sufficiently complicated) and a layered structure involving a chiral medium layer. In view of circular polarization of chiral medium eigenwaves and due to the boundary conditions, the chiral medium binds both linear polarizations: E-polarization with E/spl par/OX and H-polarization with H/spl par/OX. On the one hand, this gives rise to new interesting effects, but on the other, this adds complexity to the problem and makes it a vector one.