English

Resonant helical dichroism in twisted dielectric metastructures

Optics 2025-08-26 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

Circular dichroism, arising from interactions with light fields of opposite spin angular momentum, has become a fundamental tool for molecular characterization. Meanwhile, helical dichroism (HD) - the dichroic response to vortex beams carrying opposite orbital angular momentum (OAM) - offers an alternative approach for probing chiral molecules and photonic structures. Previous demonstrations of HD have been limited to non-resonant light-matter interactions with chiral micro- and nanostructures, leaving the realization of resonance helical dichroism largely unexplored. Here, we present the design and implementation of twisted dielectric metastructures, composed of an array of rotated silicon trimer nanostructures harnessing nonlocal photonic modes with a high quality factor of several dozen that enable strong resonant HD for OAM values up to 1010. We experimentally demonstrate resonantly enhanced HD for strongly focused OAM beams with the magnitude of topological charges from 11 to 33. Our findings pave the way for resonant nanophotonics involving OAM beams, unlocking the full potential of structured light for applications in molecular sensing, optical imaging, nonlinear optics, and optical data storage.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.14173,
  title  = {Resonant helical dichroism in twisted dielectric metastructures},
  author = {Yiyuan Wang and Chi Li and Haoyi Yu and Stefan A. Maier and Jinhui Shi and Haoran Ren and Kirill Koshelev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.14173},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 pages, 4 figures