Chirality of Dispersion Relations and Propagation Lengths of Surface Plasmon Polaritons in Single Silver Nanowire Coated with Chiral TDBC Systems

Abstract

We analyze the chirality of dispersion relations and propagation lengths of two fundamental modes (m=0 and 1) in single silver nanowire coated by chiral TDBC. The systems of both Ag nanowires only coated by left TDBC (ALM) and right TDBC (ARM) are considered, respectively. Finite-difference time-domain method is used to do the mode analysis. The results show that the dispersion relations curves of both ALM and ARM are similar to magnetic hysteresis loops. There is a dip in the propagation length of ALM or ARM versus the incident frequency at the resonant frequency of left TDBC or right TDBC. The propagation length is reduced shapely in chiral TDBC due to the dissipation of TDBC. The difference of the propagation length $$|\Delta L|$$ becomes larger with the incident frequency far away from the resonant frequency of chiral TDBC for these two modes. The maximum difference of the real part of the effective index between ALM and ARM ( $$\Delta n'$$ ) is the linear function of m and the radius of Ag nanowire. With the radius decreasing from 100nm to 10nm, the propagation length for m=0 decreases and the propagation length for m=1 increases. Also, the maximum difference of the propagation length for m=1 increases. The maximum normalized difference between Ag nanowires coated by left TDBC and right TDBC in both the dispersion relation for $$m=0$$ (0.024) and the propagation length for $$m=1$$ (0.16) are quite larger than the one of only chiral TDBC (1/3000). According to our analysis, chiral molecules can be distinguished in either the dispersion relation or the propagation length, and our proposed structure has potential applications in chiral molecules detecting.