Experimental demonstration of the microscopic origin of circular dichroism in two-dimensional metamaterials

Authors

Alexander B. Khanikaev, CUNY Queens CollegeFollow
N. Arju, University of Texas at Austin
Z. Fan, University of Texas at San Antonio
D. Purtseladze, University of Texas at Austin
F. Lu, University of Texas at Austin
J. Lee, University of Texas at Austin
P. Sarriugarte, CIC nanoGUNE Consolider
M. Schnell, CIC nanoGUNE Consolider
R. Hillenbrand, CIC nanoGUNE Consolider
M. A. Belkin, University of Texas at Austin
G. Shvets, University of Texas at Austin

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-22-2016

Abstract

Optical activity and circular dichroism are fascinating physical phenomena originating from the interaction of light with chiral molecules or other nano objects lacking mirror symmetries in three-dimensional (3D) space. While chiral optical properties are weak in most of naturally occurring materials, they can be engineered and significantly enhanced in synthetic optical media known as chiral metamaterials, where the spatial symmetry of their building blocks is broken on a nanoscale. Although originally discovered in 3D structures, circular dichroism can also emerge in a two-dimensional (2D) metasurface. The origin of the resulting circular dichroism is rather subtle, and is related to non-radiative (Ohmic) dissipation of the constituent metamolecules. Because such dissipation occurs on a nanoscale, this effect has never been experimentally probed and visualized. Using a suite of recently developed nanoscale-measurement tools, we establish that the circular dichroism in a nanostructured metasurface occurs due to handedness-dependent Ohmic heating

Comments

This article was originally published in Nature Communications, available at DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12045.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.