Dual and chiral objects for optical activity in general scattering directions

Abstract

Optically active artificial structures have attracted tremendous research attention. Such structures must meet two requirements: Lack of spatial inversion symmetries and, a condition usually not explicitly considered, the structure shall preserve the helicity of light, which implies that there must be a vanishing coupling between the states of opposite polarization handedness among incident and scattered plane waves. Here, we put forward and demonstrate that a unit cell made from chiraly arranged electromagnetically dual scatterers serves exactly this purpose. We prove this by demonstrating optical activity of such unit cell in general scattering directions.