Ubiquity of optical activity in planar metamaterial scatterers.

Recently it was discovered that periodic lattices of metamaterial scatterers show optical activity, even if the scatterers or lattice show no 2D or 3D chirality, if the illumination breaks symmetry. We demonstrate that such "pseudochirality" is intrinsic to any single planar metamaterial scatterer and in fact has a well-defined value at a universal bound. We argue that in any circuit model, a nonzero electric and magnetic polarizability derived from a single resonance automatically imply strong bi-anisotropy, i.

Electric and magnetic dipole coupling in near-infrared split-ring metamaterial arrays.

We present experimental observations of strong electric and magnetic interactions between split ring resonators (SRRs) in metamaterials. We fabricated near-infrared planar metamaterials with different inter-SRR spacings along different directions. Our transmission measurements show blueshifts and redshifts of the magnetic resonance, depending on SRR orientation relative to the lattice.