Fabrication of chiral plasmonic nanostructures

Chirality of materials would give a wide variety of advanced devices and materials including stereoscopic displays, data storage devices, metamaterials, chiral photocatalysts, and chiral sensors. We introduced chirality to plasmonic nanostructures by using circularly polarized light as the sole chiral source, for the first time. Gold nanocuboids are placed on a titania substrate and are irradiated with right or left circularly polarized light. As a result, electric fields are localized at specific corners of the cuboids depending on handedness of light, and lead oxide as dielectric moieties are deposited at the corners on the basis of plasmon-induced charge separation (PICS). The dielectric moieties boost plasmonic electron oscillation, and give chirality to the plasmonic nanostructures. This bottom-up method is suitable for practical fabrication of chiral materials in a large scale.