Enantiospecific Optical Enhancement of Chiral Sensing and Separation with Dielectric Metasurfaces

By Michelle L Solomon, Jack Hu, M. Lawrence, A. García‐Etxarri, Jennifer A. Dionne. ACS Photonics, 2019

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Circularly polarized light (CPL) exhibits an enantioselective interaction with chiral molecules, providing a pathway toward all-optical chiral resolution. High index dielectric nanoparticles have been shown to enhance this relationship, but with a spatially varying sign (or enantiospecificity) that yields a near zero spatially averaged enhancement. Using full field electromagnetic simulations, we design metasurfaces consisting of high index dielectric disks that provide large-volume, uniform-sign enhancements in both the optical density of chirality, C (the figure of merit for sensing and spectroscopy), and Kuhn’s dissymmetry factor, g (the figure of merit for separation). By varying disk radius, we achieve local enhancements in C and g up to 138-fold and 15-fold, respectively, as well as volumetric enhancements of 30-fold and 4.2-fold. The uniform-sign enhancements in C occur near the first Kerker condition, where overlapping electric and magnetic modes maximize field strength and preserve the π/2 phase ...

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d89ade15ed81e23483bbb9f47e043a9bd9bb8e04