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Extrinsic chirality: tunable optically active reflectors and perfect absorbers

Extrinsic chirality: tunable optically active reflectors and perfect absorbers
Extrinsic chirality: tunable optically active reflectors and perfect absorbers
Conventional three-dimensionally (3D) chiral media can exhibit optical activity for transmitted waves, but optical activity for reflected waves is negligible. This work shows that mirror asymmetry of the experimental arrangement - extrinsic 3D chirality - leads to giant optical activity for reflected waves with fundamentally different characteristics. It is demonstrated experimentally that extrinsically 3D-chiral illumination of a lossy metasurface backed by a mirror enables tunable circular dichroism and circular birefringence as well as perfect absorption of circularly polarized waves. In contrast, such polarization phenomena vanish for conventional optically active media backed by a mirror.
0003-6951
Plum, Eric
50761a26-2982-40df-9153-7aecc4226eb5
Plum, Eric
50761a26-2982-40df-9153-7aecc4226eb5

Plum, Eric (2016) Extrinsic chirality: tunable optically active reflectors and perfect absorbers. Applied Physics Letters, 108, [241905]. (doi:10.1063/1.4954033).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Conventional three-dimensionally (3D) chiral media can exhibit optical activity for transmitted waves, but optical activity for reflected waves is negligible. This work shows that mirror asymmetry of the experimental arrangement - extrinsic 3D chirality - leads to giant optical activity for reflected waves with fundamentally different characteristics. It is demonstrated experimentally that extrinsically 3D-chiral illumination of a lossy metasurface backed by a mirror enables tunable circular dichroism and circular birefringence as well as perfect absorption of circularly polarized waves. In contrast, such polarization phenomena vanish for conventional optically active media backed by a mirror.

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Extr3D-chiral_absorbers_rev.pdf - Accepted Manuscript
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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 27 May 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 14 June 2016
Published date: June 2016
Organisations: Optoelectronics Research Centre

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 395996
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/395996
ISSN: 0003-6951
PURE UUID: 9ec372d2-8ab3-4177-abc6-efdb38c7c80e
ORCID for Eric Plum: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-1552-1840

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 02 Jun 2016 08:49
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 05:37

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