Abstract
We investigate the chiroptical response of a single plasmonic nanohelix interacting with a weakly focused circularly polarized Gaussian beam. The optical scattering at the fundamental resonance is characterized experimentally and numerically. The angularly resolved scattering of the excited nanohelix is verified experimentally and it validates the numerical results. We employ a multipole decomposition analysis to study the fundamental and first higher-order resonance of the nanohelix, explaining their chiral properties in terms of the formation of chiral dipoles.
Highlights
Chirality in nature is a property of certain molecules which allows them to interact differently with right- and left-handed circularly polarized light
We investigate the chiroptical response of a single plasmonic nanohelix interacting with a weaklyfocused circularly-polarized Gaussian beam
Chiral molecules lack a plane of mirror symmetry in their molecular structure
Summary
Chirality in nature is a property of certain molecules which allows them to interact differently with right- and left-handed circularly polarized light. The advances in nanofabrication enabled the manufacture of artificial media of enhanced chiral response over the optical spectral range [7,8,9,10] Such media, typically called chiral metamaterials, consist of chiral metamolecules, which take the form of sub-wavelength chiral particles or particle-clusters. Tunable and strongly chiral metamolecules are desired for the realization of high-efficiency circularpolarization optical elements [13, 21] and nanodevices for dynamic light manipulation [26, 29, 35, 36] As it relates to the lack of mirror symmetry of molecules (or metamolecules), chirality is usually associated with a three-dimensional geometry [1]. Despite the intense research on these structures, only a few reports have focused on the fundamental chiroptical properties of a single plasmonic nanohelix [46,47,48]
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