Spatial dispersion and energy in strong chiral medium

Since the discovery of backward-wave materials, people have tried to realize a strong chiral medium, which is traditionally thought impossible mainly for the reason of energy and spatial dispersion.We compare the two most popular descriptions of a chiral medium. After analyzing several possible reasons for the traditional restriction, we show that a strong chirality parameter leads to positive energy without any frequency-band limitation in the weak spatial dispersion. Moreover, strong chirality does not result in a strong spatial dispersion, which occurs only around the traditional limit point. For strong spatial dispersion where higher-order terms of spatial dispersion need to be considered, the energy conservation is also valid. Finally, we show that realization of strong chirality requires the conjugated type of spatial dispersion.