Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 30, 2026
Assembly of Gold Nanorods into Chiral Plasmonic Metamolecules Using DNA Origami Templates
Published on: March 5, 2019
Chiral metamaterial composed of three-dimensional plasmonic nanostructures
Christian Helgert1, Ekaterina Pshenay-Severin, Matthias Falkner
1Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena , Max Wien Platz 1, 07743 Jena, Germany. christianhelgert@uni-jena.de
Abstract:
We introduce a top-down fabricated metamaterial composed of three-dimensional, chiral, plasmonic nanostructures for visible and near-infrared wavelengths. Based on a combined spectroscopic and interferometric characterization, the entire complex transmission response in terms of a Jones matrix is disclosed. Particularly, the polarization output state of light after propagation through the nanostructures can be decoded from the measurements for any excitation configuration. We experimentally found a rotation of the polarization azimuth of linearly polarized light exceeding 50° at wavelengths around 1.08 μm. This corresponds to a specific rotation which is significantly larger than that of any linear, passive, and reciprocal medium reported to date.
Related Concept Videos
02:25Chirality
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...
02:30Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...