Tunable chiral-selective electromagnetically induced transparency-like effect in VO2-based metamaterial for slow light applications

Abstract

A chiral metamaterial based on vanadium dioxide (VO2) is proposed to realize the ultrafast active control of an electromagnetically induced transparency-like (EIT-like) effect. The design of the tunable metamaterial is based on the heat-induced insulator-to-metal transition of VO2 and a tunable transmission peak with circular polarization selectivity is achieved. For the right circular polarization (RCP) laser incidence, the sharp EIT-like peak is generated and rises with the increasing signal powers, which has not happened in the left circular polarization (LCP) incident condition. The spin-dependent phenomenon in time domain is also observed and the slow light effect in the metamaterial yields a tunable time delay up to 4 ns. Therefore, the tunable EIT-like effect with chiral selectivity is presented and highlights its practical applications in programmable metamaterial regions and slow light devices, etc.