There are several kinds of experiments that can be done with multilayer stacks of dielectric media which require an understanding of light emission by sources within the stack for their analysis. These experiments may involve, for example, light-emitting tunnel junctions, Raman scattering in Kretschmann and other multilayered geometries, and Rayleigh scattering by small amounts of surface or interface roughness, either alone or in combination with other processes. A set of electromagnetic Green’s functions for a multilayer stack of isotropic dielectric media [D. L. Mills and A. A. Maradudin, Phys. Rev. B 12, 2943 (1975)] gives the electric fields produced everywhere by a point source of current oscillating at a frequency f. These Green’s functions can thus be used to solve this type of problem. In this paper we show how these Green’s functions can be written in terms of 2×2 transfer matrices of the type commonly used to find the fields in a dielectric stack due to an incident plane wave. With this simplification we can easily evaluate the Green’s functions for a stack with an arbitrary number of layers. We further show that, when the electric fields generated by a point source within the stack are evaluated far away, they can be written directly in terms of the electric fields that would be generated at the location of the current source by plane waves incident from the direction of the observation point. We show that this follows from the Lorentz reciprocity theorem. Thus, in this case the formalism of Green’s functions is not needed.

• Received 27 April 1987

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.36.4990