Analysis of waveguides containing EMCs (electromagnetic conductors) or PEMCs (perfect electromagnetic conductors)

•The PEMC can be regarded as the limit of special class of Tellegen media with Lorentz invariant constitutive relations, the MIM (Minkowskian isotropic medium).•The fields inside the PEMC can be uniquely defined based on a suitable limiting process.•We discuss the connection between our “field-transparent” PEMC and a hypothetical opaque PEMC that requires the presence of surface currents.•We characterize the guided modes of general MIM–SIM–MIM waveguides.•Our findings may provide new inroads for the realization of a PEMC.

The concept of a perfect electromagnetic conductor (PEMC) was introduced to generalize and unify two well-known and apparently disjoint concepts in electromagnetics: the perfect electric conductor (PEC) and the perfect magnetic conductor (PMC). Although the PEMC has proven a fertile tool in electromagnetic analyses dealing with new and complex boundaries, its corresponding definition as a medium has, nevertheless, raised several problems. In fact, according to its initial 3D definition, the PEMC cannot be considered a unique and well-defined medium: it leads to extraneous fields without physical meaning. By using a previously published generalization of a PEMC that regards this concept both as a boundary and as a medium – which was dubbed an MIM (Minkowskian isotropic medium) and acts, in practice, as an actual electromagnetic conductor (EMC) – it is herein presented a straightforward analysis of waveguides containing PEMCs that readily and systematically follows from the general framework of waveguides containing EMCs.