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.
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