Chiral Light-Matter Interactions in Nanostructured Systems
Summary
Chiral light–matter interactions arise when electromagnetic fields and materials share a handedness that breaks mirror symmetry. In nanostructured systems, tailored geometries at the subwavelength scale amplify this handedness, producing strong chiroptical responses such as circular dichroism and optical rotation far beyond those of natural molecules. Plasmonic and dielectric metamaterials concentrate and twist local fields to generate superchiral hotspots, enabling selective coupling to enantiomers and enhancing weak chiral signals. Recent progress spans classical and quantum regimes, where near-field enhancements, tunnelling electrons and resonant modes converge to push detection limits towards single molecules. These advances underpin applications in biosensing, enantiomeric separation, stereochemical analysis, photonic circuitry and chiral optomechanics, with implications for pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and quantum information. The interplay of design principles, fabrication techniques and theoretical models continues to drive a deeper understanding of fundamental mechanisms and to unlock new functionalities in chiral nanophotonic devices.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent studies have demonstrated the detection of single chiral molecules by integrating helical oligoamide sequences with nanoparticle-on-mirror resonators, achieving sensitivity to just four molecules per gold particle through a combination of quantum tunnelling and plasmonic coupling. Seminal work on twisted optical metamaterials has introduced ultrathin planar nanophotonic interfaces capable of distinguishing enantiomers at zeptomole levels, exploiting tailored plasmonic resonances to produce opposite-signed spectral features directly linked to molecular handedness.
Chiral Light-Matter Interactions in Nanostructured Systems publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in chiral light-matter interactions in nanostructured systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Chirality: Property of an object or system that is not superimposable on its mirror image, giving rise to handedness.
Circular dichroism: Differential absorption of left- and right-handed circularly polarised light by a chiral material.
Plasmonic metamaterial: Engineered nanostructure composed of metallic elements that support collective electron oscillations (plasmons) to manipulate light at subwavelength scales.
Quantum tunnelling regime: Regime in which electrons traverse potential barriers at the nanoscale, enhancing electromagnetic interactions beyond classical limits.
Superchiral field: Electromagnetic near-field configuration with a local chirality exceeding that of circularly polarised plane waves, intensifying chiroptical responses.
References
- Expanding chiral metamaterials for retrieving fingerprints via vibrational circular dichroism. Light: Science & Applications (2023).
- Quantum plasmonics pushes chiral sensing limit to single molecules: a paradigm for chiral biodetections. Nature Communications (2024).
- Chirality detection of enantiomers using twisted optical metamaterials. Nature Communications (2017).
- Tailoring Enhanced Optical Chirality: Design Principles for Chiral Plasmonic Nanostructures. Physical Review X (2012).
- Nanophotonic Approaches for Chirality Sensing. ACS Nano (2021).
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