Nature-inspired chiral metasurfaces for circular polarization detection and full-Stokes polarimetric measurements

Abstract

The manipulation and characterization of light polarization states are essential for many applications in quantum communication and computing, spectroscopy, bioinspired navigation, and imaging. Chiral metamaterials and metasurfaces facilitate ultracompact devices for circularly polarized light generation, manipulation, and detection. Herein, we report bioinspired chiral metasurfaces with both strong chiral optical effects and low insertion loss. We experimentally demonstrated submicron-thick circularly polarized light filters with peak extinction ratios up to 35 and maximum transmission efficiencies close to 80% at near-infrared wavelengths (the best operational wavelengths can be engineered in the range of 1.3–1.6 µm). We also monolithically integrated the microscale circular polarization filters with linear polarization filters to perform full-Stokes polarimetric measurements of light with arbitrary polarization states. With the advantages of easy on-chip integration, ultracompact footprints, scalability, and broad wavelength coverage, our designs hold great promise for facilitating chip-integrated polarimeters and polarimetric imaging systems for quantum-based optical computing and information processing, circular dichroism spectroscopy, biomedical diagnosis, and remote sensing applications.

Chirality Transfer from Sub‐Nanometer Biochemical Molecules to Sub‐Micrometer Plasmonic Metastructures: Physiochemical Mechanisms, Biosensing, and Bioimaging Opportunities

“…Surface plasmons, collective electron density oscillations at dielectric/ metal interfaces, [26][27][28][29][30] can dramatically enhance chiroptical responses by concentrating far-field electromagnetic waves into subwavelength volumes. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37] Over the past decade, many studies have demonstrated the feasibility of transferring molecular chirality to plasmonic nanostructures, [16,18,19,38,39] opening up a plethora of possibilities for chiral biosensing and bioimaging with unprecedented detection limits ideally down to the singlemolecule regime. A primary driving force behind this development is the breakthrough in design and fabrication of artificial metallic nanostructures, ranging from top-down techniques such as focused ion beam milling, [40] electron-beam lithography [41] and direct laser writing, [42] to bottom-up methods like chemical synthesis and self-assembly.…”

Dielectric Chiral Metasurfaces for Second‐Harmonic Generation with Strong Circular Dichroism

“…Chiral metamaterials and metasurfaces [1][2][3][4][5] have recently attracted much attention in the community of nanophotonics due to their practical applications for circular dichroism (CD), [6][7][8][9][10][11] polarization conversion, [12] chiral biosensing and imaging, [13][14][15] polarimetric detection, [16] spin-controlled wavefront shaping, [17,18] and asymmetric transmission. [10,18,19] Spin-selective optical responses can also be obtained in intrinsically achiral metasurfaces due to extrinsic chirality by the experimental arrangement different from their mirror image [20] and even by the direct phase modulation depending on the handedness of circular polarization of the incident wave.…”

Metasurfaces for biomedical applications: imaging and sensing from a nanophotonics perspective

“…The second example is by Shi et al [186] who studied the silver ants living in the Saharan desert and developed an idea of a biomimetic metasurface-based coating for the passive effective cooling of objects. The third example is by Basiri et al [187] who designed a metasurface-based polarization filter device inspired by the polarization sensing of the compound eyes of mantis shrimps. The peak extinction ratio of the metasurface device could reach a value of 35, and transmission efficiency was close to 80% in the near-infrared wavelength region.…”