Giant enhancement of the controllable in-plane anisotropy of biased isotropic noncentrosymmetric materials with epsilon-negative multilayers

Giant in-plane anisotropy can be exhibited by a finitely thick periodic multilayer comprising bilayers of an isotropic noncentrosymmetric material and a non-dissipative isotropic medium of negative permittivity, when a dc electric field is applied in the thickness direction. Compared to a homogeneous layer of the noncentrosymmetric material with the same thickness as the periodic multilayer, the latter exhibits an effective in-plane anisotropy that can be three orders larger in magnitude. This enhancement gets more substantial at higher frequencies and is electrically controllable. The incorporation of dissipation reduces the enhancement of the effective in-plane anisotropy, which nevertheless remains significant. We expect the finitely thick periodic multilayer to be useful as a polarization transformer or a modulator in the terahertz regime fully controllable via external dc bias.