Extrinsic 2D chirality: giant circular conversion dichroism from a metal-dielectric-metal square array

Giant chiroptical responses routinely occur in three dimensional chiral metamaterials (MMs), but their resonance elements with complex subwavelength chiral shapes are challenging to fabricate in the optical region. Here, we propose a new paradigm for obtaining strong circular conversion dichroism (CCD) based on extrinsic 2D chirality in multilayer achiral MMs, showing that giant chiroptical response can be alternatively attained without complex structures. Our structure consists of an array of thin Au squares separated from a continuous Au film by a GaAs dielectric layer, where the Au squares occupy the sites of a rectangular lattice. This structure gives rise to a pronounced extrinsically 2D-chiral effect (CCD) in the mid-infrared (M-IR) region under an oblique incidence, where the 2D-chiral effect is due to the mutual orientation of the Au squares array and the incident light propagation direction; the large magnitude of CCD due to the large difference between left-to-left and right-to-right circularly polarized reflectance conversion efficiencies.