Abstract
Chirality is ubiquitous in physics and biology from microscopic to
macroscopic phenomena, such as fermionic interactions and DNA duplication.
In photonics, chirality has traditionally represented differentiated
optical responses for right and left circular polarizations. This
definition of optical chirality in the polarization domain includes
handedness-dependent phase velocities or optical absorption inside chiral
media, which enable polarimetry for measuring the material concentration
and circular dichroism spectroscopy for sensing biological or chemical
enantiomers. Recently, the emerging field of non-Hermitian photonics,
which explores exotic phenomena in gain or loss media, has provided a new
viewpoint on chirality in photonics that is not restricted to the
traditional polarization domain but is extended to other physical
quantities such as the orbital angular momentum, propagation direction,
and system parameter space. Here, we introduce recent milestones in chiral
light-matter interactions in non-Hermitian photonics and show an enhanced
degree of design freedom in photonic devices for spin and orbital angular
momenta, directionality, and asymmetric modal conversion.
© 2019 Optical Society of Korea
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