Electromagnetic Chirality

Abstract: This paper presents a first-principle and global perspective of electromagnetic chirality. It follows for this purpose a bottom-up construction, from the description of chiral particles or metaparticles (microscopic scale), through the electromagnetic theory of chiral media (macroscopic scale), to the establishment advanced properties and design principles of chiral materials and metamaterials. It preliminarily highlights the three fundamental concepts related to chirality -- mirror asymmetry, polarization rotation and magnetodielectric coupling -- and points out the nontrivial interdependencies existing between them. The first part (chiral particles) presents metamaterial as the most promising technology for chirality, compares two representative particles involving magnetoelectric coupling, namely the planar Omega particle and the twisted Omega or helix particle, and shows that only the latter is chiral, and finally links the response of microscopic particles to that of the medium formed by arranging them according to a subwavelength lattice structure. The second part (electromagnetic theory) infers from the previous microscopic study the chiral constitutive relations as a subset of the most general bianisotropic relations, derives parity conditions for the chiral parameters, computes the chiral eigenstates as circularly polarized waves, and finally shows that the circular birefringence of these states leads to polarization rotation. The third part (properties and design) introduces an explicit formulation of chirality based on spatial frequency dispersion or nonlocality, analyzes the temporal frequency dispersion or nonlocality of chiral media, and finally provides guidelines to design a practical chiral metamaterial.