On Recent Findings in the Theory of Complex Waves in Open Metal-Dielectric Waveguides

Theory of complex waves (see e.g. [1] and references therein) accumulated a big volume of results. However, its biggest drawback remains which brakes significantly the development of the theory: absence of rigorous proofs of the existence of complex waves. In this respect, studies of complex waves in open metal-dielectric waveguides has been essentially enhanced when two new families of symmetric (angle-independent) complex waves have been identified [2], [3] in a dielectric rod (DR) and Goubau line (GL) with homogeneous dielectric cover: surface complex waves occurring as perturbations of real surface waves caused by the presence of lossy dielectric, and pure complex waves which have no counterpart in the set of real waves. Existence of the latter family of complex waves has been shown using a special technique and the proof [3] of the existence of an infinite set of complex roots of the dispersion equation (DE) describing waves in DR and GL.