Plasmonic enhanced chiral metamaterials

Methods are presented for tuning and enhancing the optical activity of planar chiral polymer-based metamaterials. One approach involves patterning a chiral polymer into planar chiral shapes to achieve a superposition of molecular and geometric chirality. Such materials can be fabricated using femto-second pulsed laser-based patterning of chiral polymer media. This is demonstrated via the fabrication of a planar chiral metamaterial consisting of a two-dimensional array of chiral L-structures. Another approach involves the introduction of subwavelength metallic nano-inclusions into a chiral media to further enhance its optical activity via field enhancement at the plasmon resonant wavelength of the particles. Computational modeling is performed to demonstrate the viability of achieving enhanced optical activity using both of these approaches.