Abstract
It is expected that geometrically chiral plasmonic nanostructures can enhance the intrinsic optical chirality of circularly polarized light. Therefore, we analyze the chiral near-field response of different chiral nanostructures illuminated with circularly polarized light in this chapter. We show that properly designed planar geometrically chiral nanostructures can result in a natural spatial separation of chiral near-fields with opposite handedness. Three-dimensional geometrically chiral nanostructures, on the other hand, interact strongest with one preferred handedness of the incident light and can lead to chiral hot-spots, where particularly high optical chirality occurs. Based on these findings, we provide basic design principles for chiral plasmonic near-field sources based on geometrically chiral nanostructures.
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Notes
- 1.
We will show in Sect. 8.2 that this small enhancement is not an intrinsic problem of the helix but is due to the wrong excitation of its resonance.
- 2.
A plot of this chiroptical far-field response can be seen in Fig. 2.14 where the same geometry parameters have been used.
- 3.
- 4.
This example shows once more that handedness definitions are rather arbitrary and do not lead to a deeper understanding of the discussed structure. Additional information beyond the handednesses of the constituents is necessary to analyze and describe chiral plasmonic systems properly.
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Schäferling, M. (2017). Enhancement of Chiral Fields by Geometrically Chiral Structures. In: Chiral Nanophotonics. Springer Series in Optical Sciences, vol 205. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42264-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42264-0_5
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