Due to advances in nanofabrication and in the theoretical understanding of their properties, chiral nano/metamaterials allow us to explore the limits of interaction between circularly polarized light (CPL) and matter. The essential geometrical property of these materials is that they lack mirror symmetry.1, 2 Nowadays, nanofabrication allows an unprecedented degree of control over the geometry and symmetries of materials, at scales much smaller than the wavelength of light. The relevant nanofabrication methods involve lithography and bioassembly from both top-down and bottom-up strategies. In addition, the strong field enhancements at the surface of plasmonic materials can locally sculpt the electromagnetic fields and achieve exotic states of light. As a consequence, remarkable physical phenomena have emerged, such as negative refractive index and superchiral light. Chiral nanomaterials are currently considered for numerous technological applications, including chiral molecular sensing, separation and synthesis, super-resolution imaging, nanorobotics, and ultra-thin broadband optical components for CPL. The latter include CPL absorbers, polarizers and mirrors. This special issue covers a wide variety of subjects that illustrate well the richness of the research field.1, 2 Among the topics addressed here are: control of the chiroptical properties, circular dichroism, plasmonic and biomolecular chiral responses, circular birefringence, superchiral light, asymmetric transmission, optical forces, helical waveguides, orbital angular momentum, quantum mechanical theory of chiral nanostructures, bioassemblies and hybrid nanostructures, photoluminescence in chiral particles, optical activity from hierarchical chiral systems, photoacoustic circular dichroism, extrinsic chirality, interactions of nanocrystals with chiral biomolecules that are of interest for the development of pharmaceuticals, chiral meta-atoms and metamaterials, magnetochiral effects, nonlinear optical chiroptics, surface-enhanced Raman optical activity, and chiral negative refractive index materials. Finally, it has been a great pleasure and honor to edit this special issue referring to the Chirality & Multiphoton NanoPhotonics 2016 International Scientific Seminar of the Royal Society. We thank all our colleagues who attended the event, as well as those who provided their excellent contributions to this issue. We are also very grateful to Dr. Anja Wecker and the entire editorial team of Advanced Optical Materials for their assistance in preparing the special issue. Ventsislav K. Valev is a Research Fellow of the Royal Society and Reader in the Department of Physics, at the University of Bath, UK, where he heads the MultiPhoton NanoPhotonics group. Prior to taking up this post, he was a Research Fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His research focusses on the application of chiral plasmonic nano/metamaterials to achieve enhanced chiroptical effects, especially in nonlinear optics. Alexander O. Govorov is Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Physics at Ohio University in Athens, USA. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Institute of Semiconductor Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia. His research is focused on the theory of optical and electronic properties of nanostructures and bioassemblies. John Pendry is a condensed matter theorist and has worked at Imperial since 1981. He has worked extensively on electronic and structural properties of surfaces developing the theory of low energy diffraction and of electronic surface states. He founded the field of “metamaterials”, a concept for engineered structures whose electromagnetic properties depend on their internal structure rather than their chemical constitution. He discovered that a perfect lens manufactured from negatively refracting material would circumvent Abbe's diffraction limit to spatial resolution, which has stood for more than a century. His most recent innovation of transformation optics gives the metamaterial specifications required to rearrange electromagnetic field configurations at will.
Read full abstract
Sep 27, 2018
Viktoriia Kalyna 
Open Access
