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

• Main Authors: Voronin, Kirill V, Toksumakov, Adilet N, Ermolaev, Georgy A, Slavich, Aleksandr S, Tatmyshevskiy, Mikhail K, Novikov, Sergey V, Vyshnevy, Andrey A, Arsenin, Aleksey V, Novoselov, Kostya S, Ghazaryan, Davit A, Volkov, Valentyn S, Baranov, Denis G
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 28-09-2023
• Subjects: Physics - Optics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.16479

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.