The effect of host loss on the chirality of composite chiral materials

Abstract

Composite chiral materials which exhibit the effect of chirality at microwave frequencies have been fabricated and characterized in many studies. These chiral samples were synthesized by embedding numerous randomly oriented helixes of minuscule size into a dielectric host medium. In these studies, focus been on the dependence of the chiral effect on frequency and on the characteristics of chiral inclusions such their geometrical dimensions and configurations, their concentrations, and their orientations. In this paper, we focus our attention on studying the effect of the host loss on the chirality of a composite chiral material. We found that the loss of the host material has a significant effect on the chirality. This has an implication on the design of composite chiral. The chirality parameter of composite chiral materials can be extracted experimentally or theoretically. As experimental measurements can only characterize a few chiral samples, theoretical methods have been developed to extract the chirality parameter for a wider range of chiral samples. In this paper, we employ a theoretical method similar to that developed by Luebbers et al. (1995).