Giant circular dichroism in extrinsic chiral metamaterials excited by off-normal incident laser beams

Recently it was shown by experiments that circular dichroism (CD) can be observed in the metamaterials of non-chiral structures when they were subjected to obliquely incident light (E. Plum, et al., Physical Review Letters 102, 113902. 2009). By far, external chirality simulation was only done for a particle array embedded in a homogenous medium (V. Yannopapas, Optics Letters 34, 5, 2009); no attempt has been made on simulating and modelling of circular dichroism in layered metamaterials (e.g., thin film on substrate structure). In this paper, we present the simulation of CD effect in layered external chiral metamaterials using CST software, theoretically investigate this intriguing phenomenon through a frequency domain finite integration technique, and optimize the metamaterial unit cell configurations (size, periodicity and film thickness) to maximize the CD phenomenon in near-infrared spectrum range. We show that the CD effect can be enhanced by five times using an optimized unit cell configuration, which is more than three times higher than the existing maximum theoretical results. The CD generation mechanism was elaborated with the help of induced surface current distributions. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.