Related papers: Kelvin's Chirality of Optical Beams
Chirality, or handedness, is a topic that is common in biology and chemistry, yet is rarely discussed in physics courses. We provide a way of introducing the topic in classical physics, and demonstrate the merits of its inclusion - such as…
General features of microscopic and macroscopic chiral structures can be discussed under the standard of orthogonal group theory. Configuration space of systems, not physical space, is taken into account. This change of perspective allows…
The phenomenon of molecular optical activity manifests itself as the rotation of the plane of linear polarization when light passes through chiral media. Measurements of optical activity and its wavelength dependence, optical rotatory…
Chirality, the lack of inversion symmetry, is a geometrical property critical to chemistry, biology and material sciences. In the three-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^3$ chriality can ususally be characterized with four-point…
Mirror symmetry is among the most fundamental concepts of physics and its spontaneous breaking at the molecular level allows chiral molecules to exist in two enantiomers that are mirror images of each other. The majority of chiro-optical…
This paper presents a first-principle and global perspective of electromagnetic chirality. It follows for this purpose a bottom-up construction, from the description of chiral particles or metaparticles (microscopic scale), through the…
We examine the recently introduced measure of chirality of a monochromatic optical field [Y. Tang and A. E. Cohen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 163901 (2010)] using the momentum (plane-wave) representation and helicity basis. Our analysis…
When circularly polarized light interacts with a nanostructure, the optical response depends on the geometry of the structure. If the nanostructure is chiral (i.e., it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image), then its optical response,…
Molecular chirality plays an important role in chemistry and biology, allows control of biological interactions, affects drugs efficacy and safety, and promotes synthesis of new materials. In general, chirality manifests itself in optical…
We design, in a most simple way, Fabry-Perot cavities with longitudinal chiral modes by sandwiching between two smooth metallic silver mirrors a layer of polystyrene made planar chiral by torsional shear stress. We demonstrate that the…
Synthetic chiral light fields were recently introduced as a novel source of chirality [Ayuso et al. Nat. Phot. 13, 866 (2019)]. This locally-chiral light spans a three-dimensional polarization that plots a chiral trajectory in space-time,…
In quantum mechanics, each conserved quantity (e.g., energy, position, linear momentum and angular momentum) is associated with a Hermitian operator. Its expected value can then be determined by performing a measurement on the wavefunction.…
Achieving intrinsic optical chirality requires breaking all mirror symmetries of an object, and maximum chirality, which allows interaction with only one helicity of light, is particularly promising for applications such as chiral sensing,…
We establish a general unified formulation which, using the optical theorem of electromagnetic helicity, shows that dichorism is a phenomenon arising in any scattering -or diffraction- process, elastic or not, of chiral electromagnetic…
We introduce a definition of the electromagnetic chirality of an object and show that it has an upper bound. Reciprocal objects attain the upper bound if and only if they are transparent for all the fields of one polarization handedness…
Chiral symmetry, fundamental in the physics of graphene, guarantees the existence of topologically stable doubled Dirac cones and anomalous behaviors of the zero-energy Landau level in magnetic fields. The crucial role is inherited in the…
We experimentally demonstrate a three-dimensional chiral optical metamaterial that exhibits an asymmetric transmission for forwardly and backwardly propagating linearly polarized light. The observation of this novel effect requires a…
Chiral response is of tremendous importance to many fields, such as analytical chemistry, polarization manipulation and biological sensing. Here, a chiral metasurface based on rectangular holes is systematically investigated. The results…
Chirality in polymeric systems enables a wide range of emergent optical, mechanical, and transport phenomena, yet a unified framework that quantitatively connects molecular-scale geometry to chiral behavior remains lacking. Existing…
Chirality is considered by many scientists to be mainly a geometric concept. There exists also a physical aspect of chirality which is largely being overlooked at. Two examples of mechanical devices are introduced here that represent…