Extrinsic chirality: Tunable optically active reflectors and perfect absorbers

Conventional three-dimensional (3D) chiral media can exhibit optical activity for transmitted waves, but optical activity for reflected waves is negligible. This work shows that mirror asymmetry of the experimental arrangement—extrinsic 3D chirality—leads to giant optical activity for reflected waves with fundamentally different characteristics. It is demonstrated experimentally that extrinsically 3D-chiral illumination of a lossy metasurface backed by a mirror enables tunable circular dichroism and circular birefringence as well as perfect absorption of circularly polarized waves. In contrast, such polarization phenomena vanish for conventional optically active media backed by a mirror.