Related papers: Chiral photonic crystals from sphere packing
Colloidal particles disturb the alignment of rod-like molecules of liquid crystals, giving rise to long-range interactions that minimize the free energy of distorted regions. Particle shape and topology are known to guide this self-assembly…
Surface plasmons in a centrosymmetric metal nanocrystal have been perceived as achiral, based on the quantum-mechanical theory of molecular optical activity. The one-electron theory is insufficient to describe optical activity in crystals,…
The unique topology and physics of chiral superlattices make their self-assembly from nanoparticles a holy grail for (meta)materials. Here we show that tetrahedral gold nanoparticles can spontaneously transform from a perovskite-like…
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,…
We show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…
We present the design and optical characterization of a plasmonic metasurface engineered to exhibit strong polarization anisotropy under both linearly and circularly polarized light. The metasurface consists of geometrically asymmetric gold…
The third-order non-linearity of silicon gives rise to a spontaneous four-wave mixing process in which correlated photon pairs are generated. Sources based on this effect can be used for quantum computation and cryptography, and can in…
Unidirectional (chiral) emission of light from a circular dipole emitter into a waveguide is only possible at points of perfect circular polarisation (C points), with elliptical polarisations yielding a lower directional contrast. However,…
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…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…
The interaction of radiation with chiral molecular films is not macroscopically invariant under mirror reflections and, accordingly, chiroptical effects exist which affect the spatial symmetry of the radiation profile and which nearly…
Chirality causes symmetry breaks in a large variety of natural phenomena ranging from particle physics to biochemistry. We investigate one of the simplest conceivable chiral systems, a laser-excited, oriented, effective one-electron Li…
We consider a model for periodic patterns of charges constrained over a cylindrical surface. In particular we focus on patterns of chiral helices, achiral rings or vertical lamellae, with the constraint of global electroneutrality. We study…
Increasing the sensitivity of chiral spectroscopic techniques such as circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a current aspiration in the research field of nanophotonics. Enhancing CD spectroscopy depends upon of two complementary…
Chiral spectroscopy is a powerful technique that enables to identify the chirality of matter through optical means. So far, experiments to check the chirality of matter or nanostructures have been carried out using free-space propagating…
Quasicrystals have a higher degree of rotational and point-reflection symmetry than conventional crystals. As a result, quasicrystalline heterostructures fabricated from dielectric materials with micrometer-scale features exhibit…
Interaction between dipolar forces, such as permanent magnets, generally leads to the formation of one-dimensional chains and rings. We investigated whether it was possible to let dipoles self-assemble into three-dimensional structures by…
We investigate the self-assembly of two-dimensional dodecagonal quasicrystals driven by cyclic shear, effectively replacing thermal fluctuations with plastic rearrangements. Using particles interacting via a smoothed square-shoulder…
We investigate a geometrically symmetric gold-silicon sphere heterodimer and reveal its extrinsic chiroptical response caused by the interaction with a substrate. The chiroptical response is obtained for oblique incidence owing to the…
The occurrence of biological homochirality is attributed to symmetry breaking mechanisms which are still debatable1. Studies of symmetry breaking require tools for monitoring the population ratios of individual chiral nano-objects, such as…