Giant optical activity from the radiative electromagnetic interactions in plasmonic nanoantennas

We fabricate the linear chains of twisted gold nanorods by a facile chiral molecular templating method. In such a chiral plasmonic system, particle-particle separation distances are in the order of the light wavelength and are much larger than the sizes of individual particles. As a result, the inter-particle interactions in this chiral system are mediated mainly by a relatively weak far-field plasmonic coupling, rather than a strong near-field coupling. However, such a chiral system of twisted gold nanorods show a huge surface plasmon based circular dichroism response, with the highest anisotropy factor around 0.027. This is in contrast to the previous studies in which near-field plasmonic coupling is an indispensable prerequisite to obtain strong optical activity from a chiral plasmonic nanostructure. Our study demonstrates here an alternative strategy for achieving huge chiroptical response of a chiral plasmonic nanostructure based on far-field, radiative electromagnetic interactions of metallic nanoparticles. Theoretical simulations show a satisfactory agreement with the experimental results. This study may provide more flexible ways to design chiral plasmon nanostructures with strong CD responses for various applications.