Plasmonic rod dimers as elementary planar chiral meta-atoms

Electromagnetic response of metallic rod dimers is theoretically calculated for arbitrary planar arrangement of rods in the dimer. It is shown that dimers without an in-plane symmetry axis exhibit elliptical dichroism and act as "atoms" in planar chiral metamaterials. Due to a very simple geometry of the rod dimer, such planar metamaterials are much easier in fabrication than conventional split-ring or gammadion-type structures, and lend themselves to a simple analytical treatment based on coupled dipole model. Dependencies of metamaterial's directional asymmetry on the dimer's geometry are established analytically and confirmed in numerical simulations.Comment: 3 page

Metamaterials: optical activity without chirality

We report that the classical phenomenon of optical activity, which is traditionally associated with chirality (helicity) of organic molecules, proteins, and inorganic structures, can be observed in artificial planar media which exhibit neither 3D nor 2D chirality. We observe the effect in the microwave and optical parts of the spectrum at oblique incidence to regular arrays of nonchiral subwavelength metamolecules in the form of strong circular dichroism and birefringence indistinguishable from those of chiral three-dimensional media

All-optical image recognition and processing with plasmonic metasurfaces

We engage effective nonlinearity of the coherent wave interaction on a thin metamaterial absorber to demonstrate all-optical image recognition and logical functions that in principle can be performed at THz frame rates and quantum-limited intensities

Metamaterials proposed as perfect magnetoelectrics

Magnetoelectric susceptibility of a metamaterial built from split ring resonators have been investigated both experimentally and within an equivalent circuit model. The absolute values have been shown to exceed by two orders of magnitude that of classical magnetoelectric materials. The metamaterial investigated reaches the theoretically predicted value of the magnetoelectric susceptibility which is equal to the geometric average of the electric and magnetic susceptibilities.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Negative index in chiral metamaterials

We demonstrate that planar metamaterial lacking of mirror symmetry shows asymmetric transmission of terahertz waves and bands of positive, negative and zero phase and group velocities indicating a polarization sensitive negative index and slow-light media

Reconfigurable nanomembrane metadevices

Dynamic control over metamaterial optical properties enables active metadevices. Here we demonstrate optically, magnetically and electrically actuated metadevices providing functionalities from giant nonlinear and magneto-electro-optical effects to on-demand gratings, phase gradient surfaces, beam steering and focusing of light