Detection of chirality imbalance in photonic Weyl metamaterials with mirror symmetry-breaking

Abstract

In condensed systems, Weyl quasiparticles have a massless nature and exhibit various relativistic chiral phenomena such as Klein tunneling, chiral anomaly, and Fermi arc surface states. However, in photonic systems, Weyl points (WPs) are protected by the D2d symmetry, often leading to multiple chiral WPs at the same energy level, which makes generating chirality-related effects challenging. To overcome this hinderance, a perturbation that breaks mirror symmetry in the metallic saddle structure was introduced. This perturbation effectively separates the energies of distinct chiral WPs, enabling the experimental measurement of the spectral intensity for each Weyl band and the assessment of chirality imbalance among the WPs. By maintaining time-reversal symmetry, the present study offers an approach for investigating the imbalance in the chirality of pseudo-fermionic fields in photonic materials.