Dispersionless optical activity in metamaterials

We introduce a chiral metamaterial with strong, non-resonant optical activity and very low polarization ellipticity. We achieve this by combining a meta-atom and its complementary structure into a meta-molecule, resulting in the coupling of magnetic and electric dipole responses. In contrast to either a pair of crosses or complementary crosses, this structure has low dispersion in the optical activity at the transmission resonance. We also study the excitation mechanism in this structure and optimize the optical activity through changing the twist angle. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.