  We study theoretically some unique characteristics of surface electromagnetic
waves excited at the interface between two different kinds of general
bi-isotropic media, which include Tellegen media and chiral media as special
cases. We derive an analytical dispersion relation for those waves, using which
we deduce eight different conditions under which they are generated between two
Tellegen media and between two chiral media independently of the component of
the wave vector along the interface. These make it possible to excite the
surface waves for all or a wide range of incident angles in attenuated total
reflection experiments on multilayer structures. We generalize the concept of a
conjugate matched pair to bi-isotropic media and obtain several conditions
under which the omnidirectional total transmission, which we call the
super-Klein tunneling, occurs through conjugate matched pairs consisting of
Tellegen media and of chiral media. We find that these conditions are closely
linked to those for the omnidirectional excitation of surface waves. Using the
invariant imbedding method, we perform extensive numerical calculations of the
absorptance, the transmittance, and the spatial distribution of the
electromagnetic fields for circularly-polarized waves incident on bilayer
structures and confirm that the results agree perfectly with the analytical
predictions.
