Coherent perfect absorption in chiral metamaterials.

Abstract

We study the coherent perfect absorption (CPA) of a chiral structure and derive analytically the CPA condition for transversely isotropic chiral structures in circular polarization bases. The coherent absorption of such a chiral system is generally polarization dependent and can be tuned by the relative phase between the coherent input beams. To demonstrate our theoretical predictions, a chiral metamaterial absorber operating in the terahertz frequency range is optimized. We numerically demonstrate that a coherent absorption of 99.5% can be achieved. Moreover, we show that an optimized CPA chiral structure can be used as an interferometric control of polarization state of the output beams with constant output intensity.