title: Chiral surface plasmon polaritons on metallic nanowires.
abstract: Chiral surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) can be generated by linearly polarized light incident at the end of a nanowire, exciting a coherent superposition of three specific nanowire waveguide modes. Images of chiral SPPs on individual nanowires obtained from quantum dot fluorescence excited by the SPP evanescent field reveal the chirality predicted in our theoretical model. The handedness and spatial extent of the helical periods of the chiral SPPs depend on the input polarization angle and nanowire diameter as well as the dielectric environment. Chirality is preserved in the free-space output wave, making a metallic nanowire a broad bandwidth subwavelength source of circular polarized photons.
authors.affiliation: Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Shunping
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Kui
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bao
authors.forename: Ulf
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Håkanson
authors.forename: Naomi J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Halas
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nordlander
authors.forename: Hongxing
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D008962:Models, Theoretical; D053770:Nanowires / Q000737:chemistry*; D055620:Optical Phenomena; D045663:Quantum Dots; D012834:Silver / Q000737:chemistry*; D020349:Surface Plasmon Resonance
chemical_list: D012834:Silver