The transfer-matrix method (TMM) in electromagnetics and optics is a powerful and convenient mathematical formalism for determining the planewave reflection and transmission characteristics of an infinitely extended slab of a linear material. While the TMM was introduced for a homogeneous uniaxial dielectric-magnetic material in the 1960s, and subsequently extended for multilayered slabs, it has more recently been developed for the most general linear materials, namely bianisotropic materials. By means of the rigorous coupled-wave approach, slabs that are periodically nonhomogeneous in the thickness direction can also be accommodated by the TMM. In this book an overview of the TMM is presented for the most general contexts as well as for some for illustrative simple cases. Key theoretical results are given; for derivations, the reader is referred to the references at the end of each chapter. Albums of numerical results are also provided, and the computer code used to generate these results are provided in an appendix.

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Tom G. Mackay graduated from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Strathclyde. His university education was supported, in part, by The Carnegie Trust for The Universities of Scotland. He is a reader in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and also an adjunct professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University. In 2006/07 he held a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Scottish Executive Support Research Fellowship and in 2009/2010 a Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK) and SPIE. He has been carrying out research on the electromagnetic theory of complex mediums, including homogenized composite materials, for the past seventeen years.Akhlesh Lakhtakia is the Charles Godfrey Binder (Endowed) Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his BTech (1979) and DSc (2006) degrees in electronics engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, and his MS (1981) and PhD (1983) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Utah. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nanophotonics from its inception in 2007 through 2013. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Physical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), Optical Society of America, and SPIE. His current research interests relate to electromagnetic fields in complex mediums, sculptured thin films, surface multiplasmonics and electromagnetic surface waves, bioreplication, bone nanoresurfacing, forensic science, and engineered biomimicry.