Loss-induced transition of the Goos-Hänchen effect for metals and dielectrics.

We report a unifying approach to the Goos-Hänchen (GH) shifts on external optical reflection for metals and dielectrics in particular for the case of high losses, that is for a large imaginary part of the dielectric constant. In this regime metals and dielectrics have a similar GH shift which is in contrast to the low-loss regime where the metallic and dielectric forms of the GH shift are very different. When going from the low-loss to the high-loss regime we find that metals show a much more prominent transition; we present a condition on the dielectric constant which characterizes this transition. We illustrate our theoretical analysis with a realistic example of seven lossy materials.