title: Chiral optical response of planar and symmetric nanotrimers enabled by heteromaterial selection.
abstract: Chirality is an intriguing property of certain molecules, materials or artificial nanostructures, which allows them to interact with the spin angular momentum of the impinging light field. Due to their chiral geometry, they can distinguish between left- and right-hand circular polarization states or convert them into each other. Here we introduce an approach towards optical chirality, which is observed in individual two-dimensional and geometrically mirror-symmetric nanostructures. In this scheme, the chiral optical response is induced by the chosen heterogeneous material composition of a particle assembly and the corresponding resonance behaviour of the constituents it is built from, which breaks the symmetry of the system. As a proof of principle, we investigate such a structure composed of individual silicon and gold nanoparticles both experimentally, as well as numerically. Our proposed concept constitutes an approach for designing two-dimensional chiral media tailored at the nanoscale, allowing for high tunability of their optical response.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Guenther-Scharowsky-Straße 1, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics, University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Staudtstrasse 7/B2, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.|Max Planck University of Ottawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Banzer
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Guenther-Scharowsky-Straße 1, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics, University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Staudtstrasse 7/B2, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Max Planck University of Ottawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.
authors.forename: Paweł
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Woźniak
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Guenther-Scharowsky-Straße 1, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics, University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Staudtstrasse 7/B2, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Max Planck University of Ottawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Mick
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.|Max Planck University of Ottawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.|School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Nuevo León 64849, Mexico.
authors.forename: Israel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: De Leon
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.|Max Planck University of Ottawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5.|Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Boyd