Giant intrinsic chiro-optical activity in planar dielectric nanostructures
Type
ArticleAuthors
Zhu, Alexander YChen, Wei Ting
Zaidi, Aun
Huang, Yao-Wei
Khorasaninejad, Mohammadreza
Sanjeev, Vyshakh
Qiu, Cheng-Wei
Capasso, Federico
KAUST Grant Number
OSR-2016-CRG5-2995Date
2018-02-23Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/629741
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Show full item recordAbstract
The strong optical chirality arising from certain synthetic metamaterials has important and widespread applications in polarization optics, stereochemistry and spintronics. However, these intrinsically chiral metamaterials are restricted to a complicated three-dimensional (3D) geometry, which leads to significant fabrication challenges, particularly at visible wavelengths. Their planar two-dimensional (2D) counterparts are limited by symmetry considerations to operation at oblique angles (extrinsic chirality) and possess significantly weaker chiro-optical responses close to normal incidence. Here, we address the challenge of realizing strong intrinsic chirality from thin, planar dielectric nanostructures. Most notably, we experimentally achieve near-unity circular dichroism with ~90% of the light with the chosen helicity being transmitted at a wavelength of 540 nm. This is the highest value demonstrated to date for any geometry in the visible spectrum. We interpret this result within the charge-current multipole expansion framework and show that the excitation of higher-order multipoles is responsible for the giant circular dichroism. These experimental results enable the realization of high-performance miniaturized chiro-optical components in a scalable manner at optical frequencies.Citation
Zhu AY, Chen WT, Zaidi A, Huang Y-W, Khorasaninejad M, et al. (2017) Giant intrinsic chiro-optical activity in planar dielectric nanostructures. Light: Science & Applications 7: 17158. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/lsa.2017.158.Sponsors
This work was supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (MURI, Grant Nos FA9550-14-1-0389 and FA9550-16-1-0156) and Thorlabs Inc. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology under Award OSR-2016-CRG5-2995. AYZ thanks Harvard SEAS and A*STAR Singapore under the National Science Scholarship scheme. WTC acknowledges postdoctoral fellowship support from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant No. 104-2917-I-564-058). YWH and CWQ are supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Competitive Research Program (CRP Award No. NRF-CRP15-2015-03). This work was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award No. 1541959. CNS is a part of Harvard University.Publisher
Springer NatureJournal
Light: Science & Applicationsae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1038/lsa.2017.158