Broadband high efficiency asymmetric transmission of achiral metamaterials

Asymmetric transmission (AT) effect has attracted great interest in recent years, due to its potential application in integrated photonics from GHz to optical frequency. To realize AT effect, numerous metamaterials have been proposed, mainly based on the chirality of the structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that achiral metamaterials can also have AT effect. Furthermore, it is shown that modal conversion is more essential than chirality to achieve AT effect. In particular, we have proposed a mirror symmetric metamaterial with broadband high efficiency AT effect for circular polarization wave operating at THz region. With further optimization of the unit cell, >80% of the central frequency bandwidth and average 74.05 (maximum150) transmission ratio can be obtained. The idea demonstrated here can also be applied to other frequency regions.