Using The Kramers-Kronig Transforms To Retrieve The Conductivity From The Effective Complex Permittivity

While measuring the effective permittivity of dispersive material it may be of interest to distinguish between conductivity losses (caused by free electrons) and dielectric losses (caused by bounded electrons) which both are included in the imaginary part. This usually turns out to be a non-trivial task unless suitable dispersion models for the dielectric and/or the conductivity properties of the material are assumed. In this paper we present a more general method based on the Kramers-Kronig transformations to separate the conductivity from the effective complex permittivity of a dispersive material. The Kramers-Kronig transforms (or KK-transforms) are unique integral relations between the real and the imaginary part of a complex quantity describing a causal system. The proposed method and the corresponding algorithm are tested by first supposing some fictitious values of the complex permittivity satisfying the KK-transforms. Then, different values of a conductivity are added leading to a change of the imaginary part of the effective permittivity while the real part remains the same. The effective permittivity (including a conductivity part) does generally not satisfy the KK-transforms. This fact will be employed to retrieve the conductivity from that effective complex permittivity. Finally the method is applied to measured values found in the literature to retrieve the conductivity from the effective permittivity of composite material.