Tailoring Enhanced Optical Chirality: Design Principles for Chiral Plasmonic Nanostructures

Abstract

Electromagnetic fields with strong optical chirality can be formed in the near field of chiral plasmonic nanostructures. We calculate and visualize the degree of chirality to identify regions with relatively high values. This analysis leads to design principles for a simple utilization of chiral fields. We investigate planar geometries, which offer a convenient way to access the designated fields, as well as three-dimensional nanostructures, which show a very high local optical chirality. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.2.031010 4 More Received 24 August 2011Revised 5 April 2012Published 14 August 2012 Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Published by the American Physical Society