Symmetry-broken dielectric metasurfaces for high- circular dichroic absorption based on quasibound states in the continuum
Phys. Rev. B 112, 155432 – Published 30 October, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/p87t-f4s3
Abstract
High-quality () all-dielectric chiral absorbers are crucial for enhancing spin-selective light-matter interactions by enabling differential absorption of left- and right-circularly polarized (LCP and RCP) light. Conventional approaches typically require back reflectors, which cause heat dissipation and reduce out-of-band transparency. We propose an all-dielectric chiral metasurface composed of zigzag-shaped silicon nanoparticles embedded in a uniform silica background. Each nanoparticle, formed by etching two diagonal corners from a square base, supports two bound states in the continuum (BICs) associated with vortex polarization singularities. By breaking the in-plane symmetry through asymmetric corner widths, these BICs evolve into chiral quasi-BICs (QBICs) that couple selectively to LCP light. The resulting orthogonal modes exhibit opposite parity and are dominated by a toroidal dipole (TD) and an electric quadrupole (EQ), respectively. Although each QBIC contributes less than 50% absorption due to critical coupling, spectral degeneracy between them boosts the total absorption to 90.3% at 910.3 nm, with a factor of 824 and circular dichroism of 79.3%. The design is extendable to RCP absorption via corner-length asymmetry. This approach provides a thermally efficient, planar platform for high- chiral absorption, offering promising applications in photodetection and chiral optoelectronics.