Light pressure on chiral sculptured thin films and the circular Bragg phenomenon

Abstract

For a circularly polarized plane wave incident normally on a chiral sculptured thin film (STF), we determined that light pressure per unit thickness on the film is high when the incident plane wave and the chiral STF are co-handed, the loss factor in the chiral STF is as low as possible, the wavelength is either the center-wavelength of the Bragg regime or close to it, and the ratio of the film thickness normalized by the period is moderately high.