Chiral photonic super-crystals based on helical van der Waals homostructures

Abstract

Chirality is probably the most mysterious among all symmetry transformations. Very readily broken in biological systems, it is practically absent in naturally occurring inorganic materials and is very challenging to create artificially. Chiral optical wavefronts are often used for the identification, control and discrimination of left- and right-handed biological and other molecules. Thus, it is crucially important to create materials capable of chiral interaction with light, which would allow one to assign arbitrary chiral properties to a light field. In this paper, we utilized van der Waals technology to assemble helical homostructures with chiral properties (e. g. circular dichroism). Because of the large range of van der Waals materials available such helical homostructures can be assigned with very flexible optical properties. We demonstrate our approach by creating helical homostructures based on multilayer As${}_2$S${}_3$, which offers the most pronounced chiral properties even in thin structures due to its strong biaxial optically anisotropy. Our work showcases that the chirality of an electromagnetic system may emerge at an intermediate level between the molecular and the mesoscopic one due to the tailored arrangement of non-chiral layers of van der Waals crystals and without additional patterning.

References in corpus (7)

• Measurement of the optical dielectric function of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers: MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2
• Observation of topological polaritons and photonic magic angles in twisted van der Waals bi-layers
• Observation of intrinsic chiral bound states in the continuum
• Metasurfaces with maximum chirality empowered by bound states in the continuum
• Spin-Preserving Chiral Photonic Crystal Mirror
• Tuning the valley and chiral quantum state of Dirac electrons in van der Waals heterostructures
• Chiral Discrimination in Helicity-Preserving Fabry-Pérot Cavities

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Interface second harmonic generation enhancement in hetero-bilayer van der Waals nanoantennas
• Ultrafast all-optical switching in nonlinear 3R-MoS${}_2$ van der Waals metasurfaces
• Shaping terahertz waves using anisotropic shear modes in a van der Waals mineral
• Dielectric permittivity tensor dynamics of in-plane hyperbolic van der Waals MoOCl2 and emergent chiral photonic applications