Dual-band dichroic asymmetric transmission of linearly polarized waves in terahertz chiral metamaterial

Abstract

Polarization conversion dichroism is of particular interest in manipulating the polarization state of light, whereas high-performance asymmetric transmission (AT) of linearly polarized waves is still inaccessible in the terahertz range. Here, a bilayer chiral metamaterial consisting of orthogonally chained S-shaped patterns with broken symmetry along the light propagation direction is proposed and demonstrated experimentally to realize a dual-band dichroic AT effect for linearly polarized terahertz waves. The AT effects are robust across a wide range of incident angles. The observed strong AT can be theoretically explained by a multiple reflection and transmission interference model and the transfer matrix method. The proposed bilayer chiral metamaterial may have broad applications in polarization manipulation, chiral biosensing and direction-dependent information processing.