Left and right circularly polarized light, where the electromagnetic waves spiral in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner as they travel, plays a crucial role in a wide range of applications, from enhancing medical imaging techniques to enabling advanced communication technologies. However, generating circularly polarized light often requires complex and bulky optical set-ups, which hinders its use in systems with space constraints.
To address this challenge, a team of researchers from Singapore led by Associate Professor Wu Lin of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has put forth a new type of metasurface—an ultra-thin material with properties not found in nature—that may be able to replace traditional complex and bulky optical set-ups.
They have published their research in the Physical Review Letters paper "Enabling all-to-circular polarization up-conversion by nonlinear chiral metasurfaces with rotational symmetry."
The team's proposed metasurface exhibits chirality, which makes it different from materials used in traditional set-ups. Chirality of an object means that it cannot be superimposed onto its mirror image. Like our left and right hands, chiral objects exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other. The key feature of chiral optical nanostructures, such as metasurfaces, is their remarkably different response to the left and right circular polarizations of light.
To read more, click here.