Large Chiroptical Effects in Planar Chiral Metamaterials

Chiroptical effects, characterized by different optical responses for light with left- and right-handed polarizations, are extremely weak in natural materials. Strong effects have been limited to complex three-dimensional metamaterials, but now the authors find a huge effect using just a monolayer of planar chiral metamaterial, thanks to the physics of multimode interference. The planar design greatly facilitates fabrication and can be used in a wide range of applications, such as polarization-resolve infrared detectors or chemical or biological sensors.