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The inherently weak chiroptical responses of natural materials limit their usage for controlling and enhancing chiral light-matter interactions. Recently, several nanostructures with subwavelength scale dimensions were demonstrated, mainly due to the advent of nanofabrication technologies, as a potential alternative to efficiently enhance chirality. However, the intrinsic lossy nature of metals and the inherent narrowband response of dielectric planar thin films or metasurface structures pose severe limitations toward the practical realization of broadband and tailorable chiral systems. Here, we tackle these problems by designing all-dielectric silicon-based L-shaped optical metamaterials based on tilted nanopillars that exhibit broadband and enhanced chiroptical response in transmission operation. We use an emerging bottom-up fabrication approach, named glancing angle deposition, to assemble these dielectric metamaterials on a wafer scale. The reported strong chirality and optical anisotropic properties are controllable in terms of both amplitude and operating frequency by simply varying the shape and dimensions of the nanopillars. The presented nanostructures can be used in a plethora of emerging nanophotonic applications, such as chiral sensors, polarization filters, and spin-locked nanowaveguides. L-shaped silicon metamaterials are realized exhibiting broadband and enhanced chirality. The current work sets new benchmarks in the assembly of ultrathin dielectric chiral metamaterials that can efficiently control chiral light-matter interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article in Advanced Optical Materials discusses the scaling rules for optical anisotropy in nanocolumnar structures, as revealed through Mueller matrix spectroscopic ellipsometry. Ufuk Kilic, Mathias Schubert, and their colleagues emphasize the sensitivity of optical anisotropy to changes in critical dimensions, suggesting potential applications in nano-metrology and nanoparticle sensing. The research points towards the promising future of nanocolumnar metamaterial platforms for advancing infiltration mechanisms. [Extracted from the article]

Designing broadband enhanced chirality is of strong interest to the emerging fields of chiral chemistry and sensing, or to control the spin orbital momentum of photons in recently introduced nanophotonic chiral quantum and classical optical applications. However, chiral light‐matter interactions have an extremely weak nature, are difficult to control and enhance, and cannot be made tunable or broadband. In addition, planar ultrathin nanophotonic structures to achieve strong, broadband, and tunable chirality at the technologically important visible to ultraviolet spectrum still remain elusive. Here, these important problems are tackled by experimentally demonstrating and theoretically verifying spectrally tunable, extremely large, and broadband chiroptical response by nanohelical metamaterials. The reported new designs of all‐dielectric and dielectric‐metallic (hybrid) plasmonic metamaterials permit the largest and broadest ever measured chiral Kuhn's dissymmetry factor achieved by a large‐scale nanophotonic structure. In addition, the strong circular dichroism of the presented bottom‐up fabricated optical metamaterials can be tuned by varying their dimensions and proportions between their dielectric and plasmonic helical subsections. The currently demonstrated ultrathin optical metamaterials are expected to provide a substantial boost to the developing field of chiroptics leading to significantly enhanced and broadband chiral light‐matter interactions at the nanoscale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helical Nanostructures: Broadband Enhanced Chirality with Tunable Response in Hybrid Plasmonic Helical Metamaterials (Adv. Funct. In article number 2010329, Ufuk Kilic, Christos Argyropoulos, and co-workers tackle these important problems by experimentally demonstrating and theoretically verifying spectrally tunable, extremely large, and broadband circular dichroism from new hybrid dielectric and plasmonic nanohelical metamaterial configurations operating at the technologically important visible to ultra-violet spectrum. Keywords: chirality; helical nanostructures; metamaterials; plasmonics EN chirality helical nanostructures metamaterials plasmonics 1 1 1 05/20/21 20210517 NES 210517 Chiral light-matter interactions have an extremely weak nature, are difficult to be controlled and enhanced, and cannot be made tunable or broadband. [Extracted from the article]