title: Formation of chiral fields in a symmetric environment.
abstract: Chiral fields, i. e., electromagnetic fields with nonvanishing optical chirality, can occur next to symmetric nanostructures without geometrical chirality illuminated with linearly polarized light at normal incidence. A simple dipole model is utilized to explain this behavior theoretically. Illuminated with circularly polarized light, the chiral near-fields are still dominated by the distributions found for the linear polarization but show additional features due to the optical chirality of the incident light. Rotating the angle of linear polarization introduces more subtle changes to the distribution of optical chirality. Using our findings, we propose a novel scheme to obtain chiroptical far-field response using linearly polarized light, which could be utilized for applications such as optical enantiomer sensing.
authors.affiliation: 4th Physics Institute, Research Center SCoPE, and Research Center SimTech, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. m.schaeferling@pi4.uni-stuttgart.de
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schäferling
authors.forename: Xinghui
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Giessen
mesh_terms: D002942:Circular Dichroism / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004574:Electromagnetic Fields; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D049329:Nanostructures / Q000737:chemistry*; D013237:Stereoisomerism