Asymmetric transmission of light and enantiomerically sensitive plasmon resonance in planar chiral nanostructures

We show that in the visible to near-IR part of the spectrum, normal incidence transmission of circularly polarized light through a nanostructured anisotropic planar chiral metamaterial is asymmetric in the opposite directions. The new effect is fundamentally different from the conventional gyrotropy of bulk chiral media and the Faraday effect. It has a resonance nature associated with a new type of excitation in the metal nanostructure: the enantiomerically sensitive plasmon.