English

Topological Optical Chirality Dichroism

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2026-03-31 v1 Optics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We report on a universal topological dichroism of chiral three-dimensional systems in response to the chirality of light. We show that chiral topological invariants result in integer-quantized dichroic excitation rate differences. Moreover, we demonstrate that such topological effects arise more generally from coupling optical chirality to higher tensor Berry curvatures and Dixmier-Douady invariants of quantum states, including Hopf indices. We finally propose an experimental setup that leverages superchiral light as a smoking-gun probe of chiral band topologies in three-dimensional materials. Our findings establish an optical route for probing to date unobserved chiral electronic band topologies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.28752,
  title  = {Topological Optical Chirality Dichroism},
  author = {Wojciech J. Jankowski and Giandomenico Palumbo and Robert-Jan Slager},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.28752},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7+5 pages, 2+1 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:44:35.692Z