Ubiquity of optical activity in planar metamaterial scatterers

TL;DR

This paper reveals that optical activity, or pseudo-chirality, is inherently present in any planar metamaterial scatterer due to fundamental electromagnetic principles, regardless of the scatterer's geometric chirality.

Contribution

It demonstrates that pseudo-chirality is intrinsic to all planar metamaterial scatterers and establishes a universal bound for their magneto-electric polarizability based on energy conservation.

Findings

Optical activity is intrinsic to all planar metamaterial scatterers.

A universal bound exists for the magneto-electric polarizability.

Experimental and simulation results confirm the intrinsic pseudo-chirality.

Abstract

Recently it was discovered that periodic lattices of metamaterial scatterers show optical activity, even if the scatterers or lattice show no 2D or 3D chirality, if the illumination breaks symmetry. In this Letter we demonstrate that such `pseudo-chirality' is intrinsic to any single planar metamaterial scatterer and in fact has a well-defined value at a universal bound. We argue that in any circuit model, a nonzero electric and magnetic polarizability derived from a single resonance automatically imply strong bianisotropy, i.e., magneto-electric cross polarizability at the universal bound set by energy conservation. We confirm our claim by extracting polarizability tensors and cross sections for handed excitation from transmission measurements on near-infrared split ring arrays, and electrodynamic simulations for diverse metamaterial scatterers.