Chirality
The word chiral was introduced by Sir William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, to refer to any geometrical figure or group of points that cannot be brought into coincidence with its mirror image, thus possessing a sense of handedness. The word is derived from the Greek word for hand 'χείρ'.
Our research focusses on the description of the handedness in terms of its helicity and chiraliry as well as its angular momentum, and how the handedness in ligth interacts with chiral matter.
Selected group publications on chirality
Cameron, R. P., Götte, J. B. , Barnett, S. M. and Yao, A. M. (2017) Chirality and the angular momentum of light. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 375, 20150433. (doi: 10.1098/rsta.2015.0433) (PMID:28069764)
van Kruining, K.C., Cameron, R.P. and Götte, J.B. (2018) Superpositions of up to six plane waves without electric-field interference. Optica, 5(9), pp. 1091-1098. (doi: 10.1364/OPTICA.5.001091)
Crimin, F. , Mackinnon, N., Götte, J. B. and Barnett, S. (2019) On the conservation of helicity in a chiral medium. Journal of Optics, 21(9), 094003. (doi: 10.1088/2040-8986/ab387c)
van Kruining, K. and Götte, J. B. (2016) The conditions for the preservation of duality symmetry in a linear medium. Journal of Optics, 18(8), 085601. (doi: 10.1088/2040-8978/18/8/085601)
Crimin, F. , Mackinnon, N., Goette, J. B. and Barnett, S. M. (2019) Optical helicity and chirality: conservation and sources. Applied Sciences, 9(5), 828. (doi: 10.3390/app9050828)
Crimin, F. , MacKinnon, N., Götte, J. B. and Barnett, S. M. (2020) Continuous Symmetries and Conservation Laws in Chiral Media. In: SPIE OPTO 2020, San Francisco, CA, USA, 1-6 Feb 2020, (doi: 10.1117/12.2550815)
Cameron, R. B., Götte, J. B. and Barnett, S. M. (2016) Chiral rotational spectroscopy. Physical Review A: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, 94(3), 032505. (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.94.032505)
Kelly, C. et al. (2020) Controlling the symmetry of inorganic ionic nanofilms with optical chirality. Nature Communications, 11, 5169. (doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-18869-9) (PMID:33057000) (PMCID:PMC7560753)