Tuning chirality in photonic metamaterials with semiconductor quantum dots

It has been shown recently that the classical phenomenon of optical activity, which is traditionally associated with chirality (helicity) of organic molecules, proteins and inorganic structures, can be observed in artificial planar media which exhibit neither 3D nor 2D chirality and called this effect "extrinsic chirality". This paper investigates a photonic metamaterial consisting of a regular array of nanoscale asymmetrically split ring resonators which demonstrates strong "extrinsic chirality" in the optical part of the spectrum. Results show that the resonant optical activity can be efficiently tuned by hybridizing the metamaterial with semiconductor quantum dots.