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Silicon-based Infrared Metamaterials with Ultra-Sharp Fano Resonances

Metamaterials and meta-surfaces represent a remarkably versatile platform for light manipulation, biological and chemical sensing, nonlinear optics, and even spaser lasing. Many of these applications rely on the resonant nature of metamaterials, which is the basis for extreme spectrally selective concentration of optical energy in the near field. The simplicity of free-space light coupling into sharply-resonant meta-surfaces with high resonance quality factors Q>>1 is a significant practical advantage over the extremely angle-sensitive diffractive structures or inherently inhomogeneous high-Q photonic structures such as toroid or photonic crystal microcavities. Such spectral selectivity is presently impossible for the overwhelming majority of metamaterials that are made of metals and suffer from high plasmonic losses. Here, we propose and demonstrate Fano-resonant all-semiconductor optical meta-surfaces supporting optical resonances with quality factors Q>100 that are almost an order of magnitude sharper than those supported by their plasmonic counterparts. These silicon-based structures are shown to be planar chiral, opening exciting possibilities for efficient ultra-thin circular polarizers and narrow-band thermal emitters of circularly polarized radiation.