Giant optical activity and circular dichroism in the terahertz region based on bi-layer Y-shaped chiral metamaterial

We present a bi-layer Y-shaped chiral metamaterial (CMM) that can realize a giant optical activity and circular dichroism (CD) effect to the incident linear polarization wave in the terahertz (THz) region. Numerical simulation results exhibit that the pronounced CD effect with a great difference between the transmission coefficients for the circularly polarized waves can be obtained at 5.06 THz, meanwhile the 90 degrees-polarization rotation can be observed at 5.2THz when a y-polarized wave is incident to this CMM propagating along the -z-axis. The mechanism of the optical activity and giant CD effect is illustrated by simulated surface current distributions. Further, the influences of the structural parameters of the proposed CMM to the optical activity and CD effect have been investigated numerically. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.