Efficient homogenization of multicomponent metamaterials: chiral effects

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient homogenization method for multicomponent metamaterials, enabling accurate calculation of their optical properties, demonstrated on a chiral Bouligand structure with circular polarization effects.

Contribution

The authors extend a homogenization technique to handle arbitrary multicomponent systems and validate it on a complex chiral photonic structure.

Findings

Good agreement with analytical solutions for chiral systems

Accurate prediction of circular polarization gaps

Efficient computation for complex layered structures

Abstract

We extend an efficient homogenization procedure based on a Haydock representation of the microscopic wave operator for the calculation of the macroscopic dielectric response of a periodic composite to the case of an arbitrary number of components of arbitrary composition. As a test, we apply our numerical procedure to the calculation of the optical properties of a Bouligand structure, made of a large number of anisotropic layers stacked on top of each other and progresively rotated. This system consitutes a photonic crystal with circularly polarized electromagnetic normal modes, naturally ocurring in the cuticle of several arthropods, and which has a gap for one polarization, which corresponds to the observation of circularly polarized strong metallic like reflections. Our numerical procedure is validated through its good agreement with the analytical solution for this simple chiral system.