Steerable chiral optical responses unraveled in planar metasurfaces via bound states in the continuum

Abstract

Chiral metasurfaces, with appealing properties for studying light-matter interactions at the nanoscale, have emerged as a promising platform for the realization of chiral optical responses, thereby showing advantages in chirality-related applications. The conventional approaches primarily concentrate on circular dichroism and the high $Q$ factor of the chiral resonances, while little attention has been paid to the aspects of flexibility and controllability in the modulation of optical chirality, further inhibiting the implementation of tunable and multifunctional chiral metadevices. Here, we employ a planar chiral silicon metasurface governed by bound states in the continuum (BICs) to unravel steerable chiral optical responses. In particular, the BIC-based intrinsic and extrinsic planar chiralities can be precisely steered by breaking the in-plane symmetry and the illumination symmetry, respectively. Moreover, a hybrid $\mathrm{Si}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{VO}}_{2}$ metasurface, manifested by the chiral coupled-mode theory, showcases the feasibility of actively tuning the dissipative loss while maintaining chiral quasi-BICs, then yielding desired loss-steered optical chirality. Our results provide alternative insights into tunable optical chirality and pave the way for advancements in chiroptical applications.