What makes single-helical metamaterials generate “pure” circularly polarized light?

Abstract

Circular polarizers with left-handed helical metamaterials can transmit right-handed circularly polarized (RCP) light with few losses. But a certain amount of left-handed circularly polarized (LCP) light will occur in the transmitted light, which is the noise of the circular polarizer. Therefore, we defined the ratio of the RCP light intensity to the LCP light intensity as the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. In our previous work, it's found that circular polarizers with multi-helical metamaterials have two orders higher S/N ratios than that of single-helical metamaterials. However, it has been a great challenge to fabricate such multi-helical structures with micron or sub-micron feature sizes. Is it possible for the single-helical metamaterials to obtain equally high S/N ratios as the multi-helical ones? To answer this question, we systematically investigated the influences of structure parameters of single-helical metamaterials on the S/N ratios using the finite-different time-domain (FDTD) method. It was found that the single-helical metamaterials can also reach about 30dB S/N ratios, which are equal to the multi-helical ones. Furthermore, we explained the phenomenon by the antenna theory and optimized the performances of the single-helical circular polarizers.