Optical activity in monolayer black phosphorus due to extrinsic chirality

The phenomenon of optical activity has fundamental importance and widespread applications in polarization optics, analytical chemistry, and molecular biology. In the past two decades, there has been much research on designing metamaterials with strong optical activity, which generally employs chiral plasmonic or dielectric nanostructures with resonant responses. In this Letter, we show theoretically and numerically that strong optical activity can be obtained in unpatterned monolayer black phosphorus (BP) without using resonant structures. The optical activity can be attributed to the extrinsic chirality from the mutual orientation of the BP film with in-plane anisotropy and the incident light. The obtained circular dichroism in this atomically thick material is comparable to that in previously reported chiral metamaterials, and the optical activity is inherently tunable by controlling the Fermi level of monolayer BP.