Terahertz chiral metamaterials with giant and dynamically tunable optical activity

Abstract

We demonstrated giant optical activity using a chiral metamaterial composed of an array of conjugated bilayer metal structures. The chiral metamaterials were further integrated with photoactive inclusions to accomplish a wide tuning range of the optical activity through illumination with near-infrared light. The strong chirality observed in our metamaterials results in a negative refractive index, which can also be well controlled by the near-infrared optical excitation.