Dual and chiral objects for optical activity in general scattering directions

Abstract

Optically active artificial structures have attracted tremendous research attention. Such structures must meet two requirements: Lack of spatial inversion symmetries and, a condition usually not explicitly considered, the structure shall preserve the helicity of light, which implies that there must be a vanishing coupling between the states of opposite polarization handedness among incident and scattered plane waves. Here, we put forward and demonstrate that a unit cell made from chiraly arranged electromagnetically dual scatterers serves exactly this purpose. We prove this by demonstrating optical activity of such unit cell in general scattering directions.

This document is the unedited Authors version of a Submitted Work that was subsequently accepted for publication in ACS Photonics, copyright American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see http://pubs.acs.org/articlesonrequest/AOR-3yvzAibCIU6wdTuzx9cE