Assembling optically active and nonactive metamaterials with chiral units

Metamaterials constructed with chiral units can be either optically active or nonactive depending on the spatial configuration of the building blocks. For a class of chiral units, their effective induced electric and magnetic dipoles, which originate from the induced surface electric current upon illumination of incident light, can be collinear at the resonant frequency. This feature provides significant advantage in designing metamaterials. In this paper we concentrate on several examples. In one scenario, chiral units with opposite chiralities are used to construct the optically nonactive metamaterial structure. It turns out that with linearly polarized incident light, the pure electric or magnetic resonance (and accordingly negative permittivity or negative permeability) can be selectively realized by tuning the polarization of incident light for 90°. Alternatively, units with the same chirality can be assembled as a chiral metamaterial by taking the advantage of the collinear induced electric and magnetic dipoles. It follows that for the circularly polarized incident light, negative refractive index can be realized. These examples demonstrate the unique approach to achieve certain optical properties by assembling chiral building blocks, which could be enlightening in designing metamaterials.