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Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid.

Chirality

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 26, 2025

A Micropatterning Assay for Measuring Cell Chirality

A Micropatterning Assay for Measuring Cell Chirality

Published on: March 11, 2022

Directional dipole dice enabled by anisotropic chirality.

Yuqiong Cheng¹, Kayode Adedotun Oyesina², Bo Xue²

¹Department of Physics, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong 999077, China.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|June 12, 2023

Summary

Researchers developed a novel helix particle capable of acting as a directional dipole dice (DDD). This breakthrough allows for switching between circular, Huygens, and Janus dipole types, enabling versatile light manipulation for advanced photonic applications.

Keywords:

anisotropy chirality directional dipoles light routing

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Area of Science:

Nanophotonics
Metasurface Design
Quantum Optics

Background:

Directional radiation and scattering are crucial for light manipulation in nanophotonics, antenna, and metasurface designs.
Elemental directional dipoles (circular, Huygens, Janus) are key but lack unified realization and switching capabilities.
Existing methods do not offer a single structure capable of realizing all three dipole types and switching between them.

Purpose of the Study:

To theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a unified realization of circular, Huygens, and Janus dipoles in a single structure.
To enable free switching among these dipole types for multifunctional directional sources.
To explore the synergy of chirality and anisotropy for achieving complete optical directionality control.

Main Methods:

Utilized the synergy of chirality and anisotropy in a helix particle structure.
Employed linearly polarized plane wave excitations.
Investigated the role of spin, power flow, and reactive power in determining optical directionality.

Main Results:

Demonstrated that a single helix particle can function as a directional dipole dice (DDD), exhibiting all three dipole types.
Achieved selective manipulation of optical directionality by utilizing different "faces" of the DDD.
Successfully realized face-multiplexed routing of guided waves in three orthogonal directions.

Conclusions:

The developed DDD mechanism provides a unified and switchable platform for all three elemental directional dipoles.
This approach enables high-dimensional control of both near-field and far-field directionality.
Potential applications include advanced photonic integrated circuits, quantum information processing, and subwavelength-resolution imaging.