title: Three-dimensional chiral plasmonic oligomers.
abstract: The living world is chiral. Chirality or the handedness of a structure or molecule is at the heart of life itself. Recently, it has been shown that plasmonic structures exhibit unprecedented and gigantic chiral optical responses. Here we show that truly three-dimensional arrangements of plasmonic "meta-atoms" only exhibit a chiral optical response if similar plasmonic "atoms" are arranged in a handed fashion as we require resonant plasmonic coupling. Moreover, we demonstrate that such particle groupings, similarly to molecular systems, possess the capability to encode their three-dimensional arrangement in unique and well-modulated spectra making them ideal candidates for a three-dimensional chiral plasmon ruler. Our results are crucial for the future design and improvement of plasmonic chiral optical systems, for example, for ultrasensitive enantiomer sensing on the single molecule level.
authors.affiliation: 4th Physics Institute and Research Center SCoPE, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 57, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany. m.hentschel@physik.uni-stuttgart.de
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hentschel
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schäferling
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Weiss
authors.forename: Na
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Giessen