The role of plasmonic excitations in the optical activity of periodic structures with configurational chirality

Abstract

Broken mirror symmetry of chiral structures imposes a lack of mirror symmetry in the scattering profile. When an energy dissipation channel is introduced in the system, an overall optical activity arises. Plasmonic nanostructures, therefore, are an ideal platform to induce optical activity by means of constitutional or configurational chirality. We experimentally investigate the mechanism of plasmonically induced configurational chirality in a periodic monoclinic hole array with a broken mirror symmetry. The resulting optical activity of the structure is studied by using k-space leakage radiation measurements.