Circularly polarized thermal emission from chiral metasurface in the absence of magnetic field

Abstract

We report on the thermal radiation source which emits circularly polarized thermal radiation in the absence of an external magnetic field. The geometry of thermal source includes a photonic crystal slab waveguide with chiral morphology. We show that due to the absence of a mirror symmetry of such metasurface, the thermally generated electromagnetic waves are circularly polarized with the circular polarization degree of 0.87. Using the Fourier modal method we study the structure eigenmodes and analyze the field distributions in them.