One-dimensional chirality: strong optical activity in epsilon-near-zero metamaterials

Abstract

We suggest that electromagnetic chirality, generally displayed by 3D or 2D complex chiral structures, can occur in 1D patterned composites whose components are achiral. This feature is highly unexpected in a 1D system which is geometrically achiral since its mirror image can always be superposed onto it by a 180 deg rotation. We analytically evaluate from first principles the bi-anisotropic response of multilayered metamaterials and we show that the chiral tensor is not vanishing if the system is geometrically one-dimensional chiral, i.e. its mirror image can not be superposed onto it by using translations without resorting to rotations. As a signature of 1D chirality, we show that 1D chiral metamaterials support optical activity and we prove that this phenomenon undergoes a dramatic non-resonant enhancement in the epsilon-near-zero regime where the magneto-electric coupling can become dominant in the constitutive relations.

5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication on Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (4)

• 3D-Chiral Metamaterial Showing Artificial Magnetic Response and Negative Refraction
• Non-local effects in effective medium response of nano-layered meta-materials
• Nonplanar Chiral Metamaterials with Negative Index
• Diffractionless propagation through Kapitza stratified media

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Short-Pulsed Metamaterials
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• Engineering photonic environments for two-dimensional materials
• All-optical modulation in wavelength-sized epsilon-near-zero media
• Enhanced nonlocal effects in metamaterials with moderate-index inclusions
• Extrinsic electromagnetic chirality in all-photodesigned one-dimensional THz metamaterials
• Separable metamaterials: analytical ab-initio homogenization and chirality