Dynamically reversible and strong circular dichroism based on Babinet-invertible chiral metasurfaces

Abstract

We propose a Babinet-invertible chiral metasurface for achieving dynamically reversible and strong circular dichroism (CD). The proposed metasurface is composed of VO$_2$-metal hybrid structure, and when VO$_2$ transits between the dielectric state and the metallic state, the metasurface unit cell switches between complementary structures that are designed according to the Babinet principle. This leads to a large and reversible CD tuning range between $\pm 0.5$ at 0.97~THz, which is larger than the literature. We attribute the CD effect to extrinsic chirality of the proposed metasurface. We envision that the Babinet-invertible chiral metasurface proposed here will advance the engineering of active and tunable chiro-optical devices and promote their applications.