  Recently it was discovered that periodic lattices of metamaterial scatterers
show optical activity, even if the scatterers or lattice show no 2D or 3D
chirality, if the illumination breaks symmetry. In this Letter we demonstrate
that such `pseudo-chirality' is intrinsic to any single planar metamaterial
scatterer and in fact has a well-defined value at a universal bound. We argue
that in any circuit model, a nonzero electric and magnetic polarizability
derived from a single resonance automatically imply strong bianisotropy, i.e.,
magneto-electric cross polarizability at the universal bound set by energy
conservation. We confirm our claim by extracting polarizability tensors and
cross sections for handed excitation from transmission measurements on
near-infrared split ring arrays, and electrodynamic simulations for diverse
metamaterial scatterers.
