Spontaneous natural optical activity in disordered media

We theoretically demonstrate natural optical activity in disordered ensembles of nonchiral plasmonic resonators. We show that the statistical distributions of rotatory power and spatial dichroism are strongly dependent on the scattering mean free path in diffusive random media. This result is explai...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pinheiro, F. A., Fedotov, V. A., Papasimakis, N., Zheludev, Nikolay I.
Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/81340
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46614
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:We theoretically demonstrate natural optical activity in disordered ensembles of nonchiral plasmonic resonators. We show that the statistical distributions of rotatory power and spatial dichroism are strongly dependent on the scattering mean free path in diffusive random media. This result is explained in terms of the intrinsic geometric chirality of disordered media, as they lack mirror symmetry. We argue that chirality and natural optical activity of disordered systems can be quantified by the standard deviation of both rotatory power and spatial dichroism. Our results are based on microscopic electromagnetic wave transport theory coupled to vectorial Green's matrix method for pointlike scatterers and are independently confirmed by full-wave simulations.