Design of tunable selective light-absorbing metasurfaces driven by intrinsically chiral quasi-bound states in the continuum

Abstract

Chiral metasurfaces with high quality factors (Q-factors) and strong circular dichroism (CD) are excellent platforms for studying chiral optical response. Here, a design is proposed of an intrinsic chiral silicon metasurface driven by bound states in the continuum (BIC), with ultra-high Q-factor (Q = 3722) and chirality response close to the unit CD (CD > 0.99). By breaking the in-plane and out-of-plane symmetry of the structure, the intrinsic chirality based on BIC can be precisely controlled. In addition to studying intrinsic chirality, we have also achieved extrinsic chirality by obliquely incident circularly polarized light without introducing out-of-plane asymmetry. Moreover, we introduce graphene into the intrinsically chiral metasurface to form a graphene-Si hybridized metasurface. Selective absorption of intensity-controlled right-handed/left-handed circularly polarized light (RCP/LCP) was achieved by actively tuning the Fermi level and out-of-plane tilt angle of the graphene structure based on coupled-mode theory. Our research provides another insight into the application of intrinsic optical chirality, which is expected to be widely used in the fields of optical filters, polarization detectors, and chiral imaging.