Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 7, 2026

Spectral and Angle-Resolved Magneto-Optical Characterization of Photonic Nanostructures
Published on: November 21, 2019
Chiral emission from chirotopic nanostructures
Yawei Wu1,2, Zhenyu Wang1, Zihan Wu1
1Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Abstract:
Mirror asymmetry of electronic states or optical media is expected for the emission of chiral photons, which constrains the design of dichroic materials. Here we demonstrate that these symmetry restrictions can be relaxed by harnessing the local chirality of globally achiral materials, also known as chirotopicity. Unlike chirotopic sites in molecules whose optical effects are unknown, photonic nanostructures make possible the enhancement and deliberate localization of left- and right-handed chirotopic fields by linearly polarized light. We show that intense and highly elliptic light is emitted from achiral luminophores engulfed by such fields. Luminescence dissymmetry factors between 1.65 and -1.58, approaching the theoretical limit, are obtained for nanoparticles and dyes, which may be generalized to other luminophores. After being hypothesized by Mislow more than 50 years ago, these findings validate the concept of chirotopicity and enable its utilization in chiral photonics.
Related Concept Videos
Chirality in Nature
Chirality
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 at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...
¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons
In chiral compounds such as 2-butanol, replacing the methylene hydrogens at C3 produces a pair of...
Prochirality
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers

