A transparent 90° polarization rotator by combining chirality and electromagnetic wave tunneling

A three-layer chiral metamaterial is constructed by using two layers of four mutually rotated resonators and a subwavelength mesh sandwiched symmetrically between these layers. The resulting structure is an ultrathin, transparent, and polarization angle independent 90 degrees polarization rotator. Due to the electromagnetic tunneling effect exerted by the negative permittivity mesh, a cross-polarization conversion efficiency of 99% and 93% is achieved numerically and experimentally. The structure is modeled using the effective medium theory and then the transfer matrix method is applied to demonstrate the existence of the tunneling resonance theoretically. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3682591]