Phase effects on reflection of narrow-extent optical pulses from axially excited chiral sculptured thin films

Sculptured thin films (STFs) comprise parallel bent nanowires that are 30-100 nm in diameter. Using a finite-difference algorithm, we solved the time-domain Maxwell equations to investigate the reflection of optical narrow-extent pulses from both linear and nonlinear chiral STFs. Although the axial component of the Poynting vector - the pulse shape - is invariant to changes of carrier wave phase in the incident pulse, we determined that the reflected pulse shape is affected by those changes.