Helicity-preserving optical cavity modes for enhanced sensing of chiral molecules

Abstract

Researchers routinely sense molecules by their infrared vibrational "fingerprint" absorption resonances. In addition, the dominant handedness of chiral molecules can be detected by circular dichroism (CD), the normalized difference between their optical response to incident left- and right- handed circularly polarized light. Here, we introduce a cavity composed of two parallel arrays of helicity-preserving silicon disks that allows to enhance the CD signal by more than two orders of magnitude for a given molecule concentration and given thickness of the cell containing the molecules. The underlying principle is first-order diffraction into helicity-preserving modes with large transverse momentum and long lifetimes. In sharp contrast, in a conventional Fabry-Perot cavity, each reflection flips the handedness of light, leading to large intensity enhancements inside the cavity, yet to smaller CD signals than without the cavity.

References in corpus (5)

• Electromagnetic duality symmetry and helicity conservation for the macroscopic Maxwell's equations (previously "Experimental demonstration of electromagnetic duality symmetry breaking")
• The role of the Riemann-Silberstein vector in classical and quantum theories of electromagnetism
• Achiral, Helicity Preserving, and Resonant Structures for Enhanced Sensing of Chiral Molecules
• Scattering matrix of arbitrarily shaped objects: Combining Finite Elements and Vector Partial Waves
• Decomposition of scattered electromagnetic fields into vector spherical wave functions on surfaces with general shapes

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• Computation of electromagnetic properties of molecular ensembles
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• Optimal circular dichroism sensing with quantum light: Multi-parameter estimation approach
• Electromagnetic Helicity in Twisted Cavity Resonators
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