Time-Harmonic Optical Chirality in Inhomogeneous Space

TL;DR

This paper extends the theory of optical chirality to inhomogeneous media, providing a new computational tool for analyzing polarization phenomena in nano-optical devices using finite element simulations.

Contribution

It generalizes the continuity equation for optical chirality to arbitrary inhomogeneous media and implements it in a finite element framework for practical nano-optical analysis.

Findings

Extended optical chirality theory to inhomogeneous media

Implemented in finite element method for simulations

Applied to nano-optical device examples

Abstract

Optical chirality has been recently suggested to complement the physically relevant conserved quantities of the well-known Maxwell's equations. This time-even pseudoscalar is expected to provide further insight in polarization phenomena of electrodynamics such as spectroscopy of chiral molecules. Previously, the corresponding continuity equation was stated for homogeneous lossless media only. We extend the underlying theory to arbitrary setups and analyse piecewise-constant material distributions in particular. Our implementation in a Finite Element Method framework is applied to illustrative examples in order to introduce this novel tool for the analysis of time-harmonic simulations of nano-optical devices.