Enhanced Optical Chirality through Locally Excited Surface Plasmon Polaritons

Plasmonic nanostructures provide unique opportunities to improve the detection limits of chiroptical spectroscopies by enhancing chiral light–matter interactions. The most significant of such interaction occur in ultraviolet (UV) range of the electromagnetic spectrum that remains challenging to access by conventional localized plasmon resonance based sensors. Although surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) on noble metal films can sustain resonances in the desired spectral range, their transverse magnetic nature has been an obstacle for enhancing chiroptical effects. Here we demonstrate, both analytically and numerically, that SPPs excited by near-field sources can exhibit rich and nontrivial chiral characteristics. In particular, we show that the excitation of SPPs by a chiral source not only results in a locally enhanced optical chirality but also achieves manifold enhancement of net optical chirality. Our finding that SPPs facilitate a plasmonic enhancement of optical chirality in the UV part of the spectrum is of great interest in chiral biosensing.