title: Plasmonic rod dimers as elementary planar chiral meta-atoms.
abstract: We theoretically calculate the electromagnetic response of metallic rod dimers for the arbitrary planar arrangement of rods in the dimer. It is shown that dimers without an in-plane symmetry axis exhibit elliptical dichroism and act as "atoms" in planar chiral metamaterials. Because of a very simple geometry of the rod dimer, such planar metamaterials are much easier to fabricate than conventional split-ring or gammadion-type structures and lend themselves to a simple analytical treatment based on a coupled dipole model. Dependencies of the metamaterial's directional asymmetry on the dimer's geometry are established analytically and confirmed in numerical simulations.
authors.affiliation: Institute of High-Frequency and Communication Technology, Faculty of Electrical, Information and Media Engineering, University of Wuppertal, Rainer-Gruenter-Strasse 21, D-42119 Wuppertal, Germany. szhukov@physics.utoronto.ca
authors.forename: Sergei V
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: Zhukovsky
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kremers
authors.forename: Dmitry N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Chigrin