The large-range strength-switchable circular dichroism in a mechanically reconfigurable chiral metasurface

The strength-switchable circular dichroism (CD) is crucial in the fields of biological detection, analytical chemistry, etc. In this paper, we achieved large-range strength-switchable CD by mechanically stretching polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. With normal incidence, the traditional C4 rotation symmetric Pd-shaped chiral array could exhibit obvious optical activity but near-zero CD. However, we found that the giant CD could be gained by breaking the period symmetry in x- and y-directions in the Pd-shaped array. By mechanically stretching PDMS substrate in x-direction, the magnitude of CD is dynamically switched from 0.99 to 0 at 1314.5 nm. Essentially, the giant CD originates from the circular polarization selective excitations of magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole resonances, which is demonstrated by quantitative multipole decomposition and electric and magnetic field analysis. The giant and large-range strength-switchable CD has great potentials in the next generation optical devices.