Toroidal optical activity

Abstract

Optical activity is ubiquitous across natural and artificial media and is conventionally understood in terms of scattering from electric and magnetic moments. Here we demonstrate experimentally and confirm numerically a type of optical activity that cannot be attributed to electric and magnetic multipoles. We show that our observations can only be accounted for by the inclusion of the toroidal dipole moment, the first term of the recently established peculiar family of toroidal multipoles.