Optical chirality has been recently suggested to complement the physically relevant conserved quantities of the well-known Maxwell's equations. This time-even pseudoscalar is expected to provide further insight in polarization phenomena of electrodynamics such as spectroscopy of chiral molecules. Previously, the corresponding continuity equation was stated for homogeneous lossless media only. We extend the underlying theory to arbitrary setups and analyse piecewise-constant material distributions in particular. Our implementation in a Finite Element Method framework is applied to illustrative examples in order to introduce this novel tool for the analysis of time-harmonic simulations of nano-optical devices.

Date Published: 14 March 2016
PDF: 15 pages
Proc. SPIE 9756, Photonic and Phononic Properties of Engineered Nanostructures VI, 97560X (14 March 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2209551

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9756:
Photonic and Phononic Properties of Engineered Nanostructures VI
Ali Adibi; Shawn-Yu Lin; Axel Scherer, Editor(s)