Chiro-plasmonic refractory metamaterial with titanium nitride (TiN) core-shell nanohelices

Chiral metamaterials are obtained by assembling plasmonic elements in geometries with broken mirror symmetry, which can have promising applications pertaining to generation, manipulation and detection of optical polarisation. The materials used to fabricate this promising nanosystem, especially in the visible-NIR regime, are limited to noble metals such as Au and Ag. However, they are not stable at elevated temperatures and in addition, incompatible with CMOS technologies. We demonstrate that it is possible to develop a chiro-plasmonic system based on a refractory material such as titanium nitride (TiN) which does not have these disadvantages. The building block of our metamaterial is a novel core-shell helix, obtained by coating TiN over silica nanohelices. These were arranged in a regular two-dimensional array over cm-scale areas, made possible by the use of scalable fabrication techniques such as laser interference lithography, glancing angle deposition and DC magnetron sputtering. The measured chiro-optical response was extremely broadband (<500 nm to >1400 nm), and had contributions from individual, as well as collective plasmon modes of the interacting nanohelices, whose spectral characteristics could be easily controlled by varying the direction of the incident radiation.