Chiral metamaterials: simulations and experiments

Electromagnetic metamaterials are composed of periodically arranged artificial structures. They show peculiar properties, such as negative refraction and super-lensing, which are not seen in natural materials. The conventional metamaterials require both negative epsilon and negative mu to achieve negative refraction. Chiral metamaterial is a new class of metamaterials offering a simpler route to negative refraction. In this paper, we briefly review the history of metamaterials and the developments on chiral metamaterials. We study the wave propagation properties in chiral metamaterials and show that negative refraction can be realized in chiral metamaterials with a strong chirality, with neither epsilon nor mu negative required. We have developed a retrieval procedure, adopting a uniaxial bi-isotropic model to calculate the effective parameters such as n +/-, kappa, epsilon and mu of the chiral metamaterials. Our work on the design, numerical calculations and experimental measurements of chiral metamaterials is introduced. Strong chiral behaviors such as optical activity and circular dichroism are observed and negative refraction is obtained for circularly polarized waves in these chiral metamaterials. We show that 3D isotropic chiral metamaterials can eventually be realized.