Abstract

Recently we have shown that the classical phenomenon of optical activity, which is traditionally associated with chirality (helicity) of organic molecules, proteins and inorganic structures, can be observed in artificial planar media which exhibit neither 3D nor 2D chirality and called this effect "extrinsic chirality", see Fig. 1 (a) and (b). Here chirality is derived from the mutual orientation of the light beam and the metamaterial array. We observed the effect in the microwave part of the spectrum at oblique incidence to regular arrays of non-chiral sub¬ wavelength meta-molecules in form of strong circular dichroism and birefringence indistinguishable from those of chiral three-dimensional media [1].

© 2009 IEEE