Characterizing optical chirality

By K. Bliokh, Franco Nori. 2010

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the recently introduced measure of chirality of a monochromatic optical field [Y. Tang and A. E. Cohen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 163901 (2010)] using the momentum (plane-wave) representation and helicity basis. Our analysis clarifies the physical meaning of the measure of chirality and unveils its close relation to the polarization helicity, spin angular momentum, energy density, and Poynting energy flow. We derive the operators of the optical chirality and of the corresponding chiral momentum, which acquire remarkably simple forms in the helicity representation.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c2585361dab8afa1f3a49e733bd7a39c7cf282c

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

In Spectroscopy

Citations in the corpus

Theory and applications of free-electron vortex states (2017, background): “Circular dichroism enables optical probing of chiral objects using only polarization (spin or helicity) degrees of freedom of light [281, 282, 283, 284].”
Discriminatory optical force for chiral molecules (2014, background): “In this context, it appears, in fact, that we could equally well have identified any one of an infinite number of lower- and higher-order extensions of h [71, 73, 82], amongst them, the 00-zilch density Z 000 [83, 84], which was re-introduced into the literature recently in connection with fluoresce”
Internal flows and energy circulation in light beams (2010, unknown): “It is worth noticing that the energy density and energy flow have useful counterparts – the chirality density (spin energy) and chirality flow (SAM density) [170–173].”
Optical helicity, optical spin and related quantities in electromagnetic theory (2012, background): “A connection between the zilches and the helicity of the field was proposed recently by Bliokh and Nori [35].”