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

¹ Department of Physics, Zhejiang University of Technology - Hangzhou 310023, China
² Collaborative Innovation Center for Bio- Med Physics Information Technology of ZJUT, Zhejiang University of Technology - Hangzhou 310023, China
³ Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516/UJM/University of Lyon - 42000 Saint- Etienne, France

^(a) boyan@zjut.edu.cn

Received: 1 July 2020
Accepted: 6 September 2020

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.