Super-chirality of paraxial higher order Poincare modes

TL;DR

This paper shows that higher order Poincare modes of light exhibit super-chirality, with enhancement factors increasing with mode order, enabling stronger interactions with chiral matter and broad control over light's helicity.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of super-chirality in higher order Poincare modes, revealing their potential for enhanced chiral optical interactions and flexible helicity control.

Findings

Higher order Poincare modes are super-chiral with enhancement factors proportional to m and m^2.

Modes with arbitrarily large m can achieve unlimited super-chirality.

Potential applications include enhanced optical interactions with chiral substances.

Abstract

We demonstrate that higher order Poincare modes of order m are super-chiral, displaying enhancement factors proportional to $m$ and $m^2$ in their helicity/chirality. With m having arbitrarily large integer values, such modes, in principle, possess unlimited super-chirality. These findings pave the way to applications, including the strong enhancements of optical interactions with chiral matter. The work indicates considerable flexibility in controlling the helicity of any higher order paraxial twisted light mode and it incorporates a very wide range of physical scenarios.