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Chirality

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
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...

Chirality in Nature

Chirality in Nature

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 at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur

Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur

Chirality is most prevalent in carbon-based tetrahedral compounds, but this important facet of molecular symmetry extends to sp3-hybridized nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur centers, including trivalent molecules with lone pairs. Here, the lone pair behaves as a functional group in addition to the other three substituents to form an analogous tetrahedral center that can be chiral.
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...

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Demonstration of Equal-Intensity Beam Generation by Dielectric Metasurfaces

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Programmable Chiral Radiation via Spin-Decoupled Metasurface with Integrated Compound Phases.

Lu Song^1,2, Jian Ma³, Min Li^1,4

¹Anhui Provincial Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Information Perception and Intelligent Computing, Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Smart Agricultural Technology and Equipment, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, 210036, China.

Advanced Science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany)

|November 5, 2025

Summary

This study introduces a programmable metasurface for dynamic control of chiral radiation. It enables high-purity chiral beams with reconfigurable direction, overcoming limitations of static architectures.

Keywords:

chiral radiation geometric phase propagation phase reconfigurable metasurfaces

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Area of Science:

Metasurfaces and Nanophotonics
Chiral Optics
Electromagnetics

Background:

Chiral radiation is crucial for advanced applications like sensing and communications.
Current metasurfaces struggle with dynamic reconfigurability and maintaining polarization purity due to static designs and spin coupling.
Achieving controllable, high-purity chiral beams is a significant challenge in optical engineering.

Purpose of the Study:

To present a novel programmable spin-decoupled metasurface for generating high-purity chiral radiation.
To enable dynamic and reconfigurable control over the emission direction of chiral beams.
To overcome the limitations of static metasurface architectures in chiral radiation applications.

Main Methods:

Integration of propagation and geometric phase at subwavelength scales.
Development of chiral radiators employing a compound phase-decoupling strategy.
Incorporation of positive intrinsic negative (PIN) diodes for active phase modulation and real-time directional control.
Utilizing circular dichroism-based amplitude discrimination and destructive interference for suppressing unwanted spin components.

Main Results:

Demonstration of a 1-bit programmable chiral metasurface with a thickness of 0.1λ₀.
Realization of chiral radiation with reconfigurable emission direction over a wide angular range (±45°).
Maintenance of high purity in chiral beams, evidenced by a 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth of 10.4%.

Conclusions:

The proposed metasurface offers a compact and scalable solution for engineering chirality and directionality.
This work advances the dynamic control of chiral radiation, paving the way for next-generation optical devices.
The spin-decoupled approach successfully addresses the challenge of polarization purity degradation in reconfigurable chiral metasurfaces.