Abstract
In this paper, we investigate an artificially-synthesized absorbing medium by using the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) technique. The artificial medium is composed of a doubly-periodic array of lossy electric and magnetic material blocks (i.e., μ and ε media arranged in a checkerboard configuration). We analyze its reflection characteristics for both normal and oblique incidence cases. It is demonstrated that, if properly designed, the reflection characteristics of the checkerboard are considerably superior to those of a uniform ε = μ material of the same thickness. A multi-layer checkerboard is used to truncate a waveguide in the FDTD simulation; the result is comparable to that of an unsplit Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) with the same number of layers.