Giant circular polarization conversion in layer-by-layer nonchiral metamaterial

We studied numerically the transmission properties of a kind of layer-by-layer nonchiral metamaterial. Simulation results show that under certain off-normal incidence, giant circular polarization conversion occurs for both the right and left circularly polarized waves with a roughly 1 GHz operation band. Meanwhile, the copolarization transmissions are almost suppressed to zero, leading to the high purity circular polarization transformation. This phenomenon of giant circular polarization conversion is assumed to suffer from the strong magnetic response, which is illustrated by the surface current distributions of the structure. Compared with chiral structures, this nonchiral structure is easier to design and fabricate and is expected to be used as a promising circular polarization transformer. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America