Unidirectional invisibility and enhanced reflection of short pulses in quasi-PT-symmetric media.

We consider the interaction of a short optical pulse with a layer with periodically modulated permittivity and a periodic gain-and-loss landscape. It is found that if the medium is quasi-parity-time (PT)-symmetric in the vicinity of the exceptional point, the propagation manifests strong unidirectional reflection and invisibility. Due to strong frequency selectivity, quasi-PT-symmetric periodic layers manifest efficient filtering of back-radiation.