Chiral THz Metamaterial with Tunable Optical Activity

Chiral metamaterials represent a special type of artificial structures that cannot be superposed to their mirror images. Due to the lack of mirror symmetry, cross-coupling between electric and magnetic fields exist in chiral mediums and present unique electromagnetic characters of circular dichroism and optical activity, which provide a new opportunity to tune polarization and realize negative refractive index. Chiral metamaterials have attracted great attentions in recent years and have given rise to a series of applications in polarization manipulation, imaging, chemical and biological detection, and nonlinear optics. Here we review the fundamental theory of chiral media and analyze the construction principles of some typical chiral metamaterials. Then, the progress in extrinsic chiral metamaterials, absorbing chiral metamaterials, and reconfigurable chiral metamaterials are summarized. In the last section, future trends in chiral metamaterials and application in nonlinear optics are introduced.

There has been a considerable effort recently in the development of planar chiral metamaterials. Owing to the lack of inversion symmetry, these materials have been shown to display interesting physical properties such as negative index of refraction and giant optical activity. However, the biosensing capabilities of these chiral metamaterials have not been fully explored. Ultrasensitive detection and structural characterization of proteins adsorbed on chiral plasmonic substrates was demonstrated recently using UV-visible circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. Second harmonic generation microscopy is an extremely sensitive nonlinear optical probe to investigate the chirality of biomaterials. In this study, we characterize the chiral response of chiral plasmonic metamaterials using second harmonic generation microscopy and CD spectroscopy. These planar chiral metamaterials, fabricated by electron-beam lithography, consist of right-handed and left-handed gold gammadions of length 400 nm and thickness 100nm, deposited on a glass substrate and arranged in a square lattice with a periodicity of 800nm.

In this article, recent progress and development of terahertz chiral metamaterials including stereometamaterials are thoroughly reviewed. This review mainly focuses on the fundamental principles of design and arrangement of meta-atoms in metamaterials exhibiting chirality with various asymmetry and symmetry and 2D and 3D configuration. Related optical and propagation properties in chiral metamaterials, such as optical activity, circular dichroism, and negative refraction for each different chiral metamaterials, are compared and investigated. Finally, comparison between chiral metamaterials with stereometamaterials in terms of the polarization selective operation along with the similarity and the distinction is addressed as well.

Chiral metamaterials have been a research area for many researchers due to their polarization rotation properties on electromagnetic waves. However, most of the proposed chiral metamaterials are designed depending on experience or time-consuming inefficient simulations. A method is investigated for designing a chiral metamaterial with a strong and natural chirality admittance by optimizing a grid of metallic pixels through both sides of a dielectric sheet placed perpendicular to the incident wave by using a genetic algorithm (GA) technique based on finite element method solver. The effective medium parameters are obtained by using constitutive equations and S parameters. The proposed methodology is very efficient for designing a chiral metamaterial with the desired effective medium parameters. By using GA-based topology, it is proven that a chiral metamaterial can be designed and manufactured more easily and with a low cost.

Metasurfaces are usually planar structures and do not possess intrinsic chirality and therefore hardly generate optical activity. Here we realized a tunable optical activity in a terahertz wave through a microfluid-based soft metasurface. The meta-atom is a chiral structured microchannel made of soft polydimethylsiloxane and injected with the liquid metal Galinstan. A microfluid pressure system is bonded to the metasurface to reconfigure all meta-atoms simultaneously. By pumping glycerol liquid into the pressure system, the metasurface is deformed from a planar structure to a three dimensional one, which manifests intrinsic chirality for optical activity realization. By controlling the injected glycerol volume, a polarization rotation from 0°to 14° at 0.19 THz is demonstrated. The soft metasurface with tunable optical activity can be flexibly applied in various applications such as polarization microscopy, bio-detection and material analysis, etc.

We propose a new uniaxial chiral metamaterial which is composed of four crescent shaped split-ring resonators mutually twisted by 90° and patterned on opposite sides of a dielectric substrate. It illustrates a strong optical activity and circular dichroism in the range from 5 GHz to 10 GHz. The presented design can be fabricated more easily due to its efficient metallic structures. Furthermore, chirality value of this proposed chiral metamaterial is large enough the optical applications. This study also shows that the proposed crescent shaped chiral metamaterials have good responses when compared with other studied samples in literature. All validations are performed by computer simulation program CST Microwave Studio in the 5–10 GHz frequency range.

Terahertz angle-insensitive 90° polarization rotator using chiral metamaterial

Chiral and bianisotropic metamaterials, where coupling of magnetic and electric phenomena plays an important role, offer advanced possibilities for the control and manipulation of electromagnetic waves. Such a control is particularly useful in the THz and far-IR region where natural materials do not show strong response and thus they are not offered as components for a direct realization of electromagnetic wave manipulation. Among the most useful and important capabilities of chiral and bianisotropic metamaterials is the advanced control of the wave polarization that they offer, including giant polarization rotation, conversion, filtering, absorption, etc. In this paper we review our recent work demonstrating some of those capabilities, in a variety of structures, both planar and 3D-bulk ones. The structures presented show, among others, large optical activity, tunable/switchable wave ellipticity, and polarization-dependent asymmetric transmission.

Fixed-frequency beam scanning leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) that can scan their main beam over a specific frequency band are highly desired for future wireless communication systems. A composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) LWA is developed in this article that facilitates fixed-frequency continuous beam scanning over a wide operational frequency band. A variation of a simple single-layer nonreconfigurable frequency-based continuous beam scanning CRLH LWA is considered first. Its dispersion properties are approximately investigated using an equivalent circuit model. It is reported how two groups of varactor diodes can be incorporated into its basic circuit model to electronically control its dispersion behavior. An optimized reconfigurable CRLH LWA with practical dc biasing lines is then realized from this nonreconfigurable design. Fixed-frequency continuous beam scanning, from backward to forward directions through broadside, is reported over a wide operational frequency band. Simulations predict that the antenna can operate from 4.75 to 5.25 GHz with the main beam being continuously scannable at each frequency point. A prototype was fabricated, assembled, and tested. The measured results confirm its simulated performance characteristics.

Easy-to-fabricate, large-area, and inexpensive microstructures that realize control of the polarization of terahertz (THz) radiation are of fundamental importance to the development of the field of THz wave photonics. However, due to the lack of natural materials that can facilitate strong THz radiation-matter interactions, THz polarization components remain an undeveloped technology. Strong resonance-based responses offered by THz metamaterials have led to the recent development of THz metadevices, whereas, for polarization control devices, micrometer-scale fabrication techniques including aligned photolithography are generally required to create multilayer microstructures. In this work, leveraging a two-step textile manufacturing approach, a chiral metamaterial capable of exhibiting strong chiroptical responses at THz frequencies is demonstrated. Chiral-selective transmission and pronounced optical activity are experimentally observed. In sharp contrast to smart-clothing-related devices (e.g., textile antennas), the investigated chiral metamaterials gain their THz properties directly from the yarn-twisting enabled microhelical strings. It is envisioned that the interplay between meta-atom designs and textile manufacturing technology will lead to a new family of metadevices for complete control over the phase, amplitude, and polarization of THz radiation.

In recent years, considerable research has been carried out relative to the electromagnetic (EM) propagation and refraction characteristics in metamaterials with emphasis on the origins of negative refractive index. Negative refractive index may be introduced in metamaterials via different methods; one such is the con- dition whereby the Poynting vector of the EM wave is in opposition to the group velocity in the material. Alternatively, negative refractive index also occurs when the group and phase velocities in the medium are in opposition. The latter phenomenon has been extensively investigated in the literature, including recent work involving chiral metamaterials with material dispersion up to the first order. This paper examines the pos- sible emergence of negative refractive index in dispersive chiral metamaterials with material dispersion up to the second order. The motivation is to determine if using second- as opposed to first-order dispersion may lead to more practical negative index behavior. A spectral approach combined with a slowly time-varying phasor analy- sis is applied, leading to the analytic derivation of EM phase and group velocities, and the resulting phase and group velocities and the corresponding phase and group indices are evaluated by selecting somewhat arbitrary dispersive parameters. The results indicate the emergence of negative index (via negative phase indices along with positive group indices, as reported in the literature) or negative index material (NIM) behavior over infor- mation bandwidths in the low RF range. The second-order results are not significantly better than those for first-order results based on the theoretical analysis; however, greater parametric flexibility exists for the second-order system leading to the higher likelihood of achieving NIM over practical frequency bands. The velocities and indices computed using the Lorentzian and Condon models yield an NIM bandwidth around 200 − 400 Mrad∕sec, about 2 orders of magnitude higher than that for the parametric approach; more impor- tantly, NIM is found not to occur in the first order when using practical models. © 2015 Society of Photo-Optical

In this paper, a dualband chiral metamaterial (CMM) based on cross-wire structure is proposed and studied numerically. It exhibits dual-band giant optical activity and negative refractive index in terahertz region. The surface current distributions are calculated to explain original physics. The further numerical results show that the efiective frequency bands of the CMMs can be independent adjusted easily by changing the structure geometrical parameter. The designed dual-band terahertz CMMs ofier ∞exibility in the investigation of novel terahertz device application.

Metamaterials with tailored electromagnetic properties present incomparable advantages in manipulation and control of electromagnetic polarization states. Here, we report a unique chiral metamaterial (CMM) composed of three layers of metasurfaces. Taking advantage of the Fabry–Pérot-like interference effect, the suggested CMM is capable of achieving high-efficiency broadband or multiband cross-polarization conversion for different linearly polarized incident waves, while also showing strong asymmetric transmission effect for the opposite propagation directions. With the specially designed geometry, the present CMM can even simultaneously accomplish nearly 90°-polarization rotation for both the x- and y-polarized incident waves, thereby enabling more opportunities for designing high-performance polarimetric devices.

In this paper, a multi-band chiral metamaterials (CMMs) based on complementary cross-wire structure is proposed and studied numerically. The finite element method (FEM) method was used to simulate the EM properties of the designed structure. Numerical results indicate that the giant optical activity and multiband negative refractive index can be realized in terahertz region. The proposed CMMs may have some potential applications in novel terahertz device.Particle size of bayerite (d50) was about 24 μm. Al2O3was obtained after calcination at 1050 °C for 1.5 h.

Optical activity (polarization rotation of light) is one of the most desired features of chiral media, as it is important for many polarization‐related applications. However, in the THz region, chiral media with strong optical activity are not available in nature. Here, a chiral metamaterial (CMM) structure composed of pairs of vertical U‐shape resonators of “twisted” arms is studied, and it is revealed that it demonstrates large pure optical activity (i.e., optical activity associated with negligible transmitted wave ellipticity) in the low THz regime. The experimental data show polarization rotation up to 25° for an unmatched bandwidth of 1 THz (relative bandwidth 80%), from a 130 µm‐thickness structure, while theoretical optimizations show that the rotation can reach 45°. The enhanced chiral response of the structure is analyzed through an equivalent RLC circuit model, which also provides simple optimization rules for the enhancement of its chiral response. The proposed chiral design allows for easy fabrication via direct laser writing (DLW) and electroless metal plating, making the associated structures suitable candidates for polarization control applications.