Study of the effect of host loss on the chirality of composite chiral materials

The effect of the host loss on the chirality of composite chiral materials is investigated. A modified single scattering theory is used to calculate the chirality parameters of composite chiral materials with different host losses. Results show that when the host loss is decreased, both the imaginary and the real parts of the chirality parameter increase very rapidly at frequencies near the resonant frequency of the embedded helixes and become narrower in bandwidth. However, only a small effect is observed for frequencies away from the resonant frequency. The effect of the host loss on the propagation constants of the two circularly polarized eigenwaves is also investigated. It is found that the host loss gives rise to rather significant imaginary parts of the propagation constants of the two eigenwaves and these imaginary parts increase with frequency. The effect of the host loss on the real parts of the propagation constant of the two eigenwaves is only observable near the resonant frequency of the embedded helixes. This study is limited to chiral materials with a dilute concentration of chiral inclusions.