Buckybowls are polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons that have a curved aromatic surface and are considered fragments of buckminsterfullerenes. The curved aromatic surface led to the loss of planar symmetry of the normal aromatic plane and may cause unique inherent chirality, so-called bowl chirality, which it is possible to thermally racemize through a bowl-to-bowl inversion process. In this short...

Manipulation of a vector micro-beam with an optical antenna has significant potentials for nano-optical technology applications including bio-optics, optical fabrication, and quantum information processing. We have designed and demonstrated a central aperture antenna within an Archimedean spiral that extracts the bonding plasmonic field from a surface to produce a new vector focal spot in far-f...

In article number 2300599, Z.L. Cao, J.Y. Li, S.Z. Deng, and H.J. Chen introduce a rigorous quasinormal mode (QNM) expansion approach for analyzing the interplay between geometrical chirality, far-field circular dichroism, near-field optical chirality. The study reveals that chiroptical handedness strongly depends on excitation direction, whereas chirality is governed by corresponding QNMs.

Chirality is exhibited by objects that cannot be rotated into their mirror images. It is far from obvious that this has anything to do with the angular momentum of light, which owes its existence to rotational symmetries. There is nevertheless a subtle connection between chirality and the angular momentum of light. We demonstrate this connection and, in particular, its significance in the conte...

Optical sensors that respond to enantiomeric excess of chiral analytes are highly demanded in chirality related research fields and demonstrate their potential in many applications, for example, screening of asymmetric reaction products. Most sensors developed so far are small molecules. This Tutorial Review covers recent advances in chirality sensing systems that are different from the traditi...

Chirality is an intriguing property of certain molecules, materials or artificial nanostructures, which allows them to interact with the spin angular momentum of the impinging light field. Due to their chiral geometry, they can distinguish between left- and right-hand circular polarization states or convert them into each other. Here we introduce an approach towards optical chirality, which is ...

Scientists have been fascinated by chirality, meaning rightor left-handedness, in the structure ofmatter ever since the concept first arose as a result of the discovery, in the early years of the nineteenth century, of natural optical activity in refracting media. The concept of chirality has inspired major advances in physics, chemistry and the life sciences [1, 2]. Even today, chirality conti...

Switching the handedness, or the chirality, of a molecule is of great importance in chemistry and biology, as molecules of different handedness exhibit dramatically different physiological properties and pharmacological effects. Here we experimentally demonstrate handedness switching in metamaterials, a new class of custom-designed composites with deep subwavelength building blocks, in response...

Chirality in molecular opto-electronics is limited sofar to the use of optically active liquid crystals and a number of optical phenomena are related to the helical macroscopic structure obtained by using one enantiomer, only. In this paper, the use of chirality in nonlinear optics and optical switching is demonstrated. The additional options offered by the combination of circularly polarized l...