Optical chirality without optical activity: How surface plasmons give a twist to light

Light interacts differently with left and right handed three dimensional chiral objects, like helices, and this leads to the phenomenon known as optical activity. Here, by applying a polarization tomography, we show experimentally, for the first time in the visible domain, that chirality has a different optical manifestation for twisted planar nanostructured metallic objects acting as isolated chiral metaobjects. Our analysis demonstrate how surface plasmons, which are lossy bidimensional electromagnetic waves propagating on top of the structure, can delocalize light information in the just precise way for giving rise to this subtle effect. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.