Spontaneous natural optical activity in disordered media

Abstract

We demonstrate natural optical activity in disordered ensembles of non-chiral plasmonic resonators. We show that the statistical distributions of rotatory power and spatial dichroism are strongly dependent on the scattering mean free path in diffusive random media. This result is explained in terms of the intrinsic geometric chirality of disordered media, as they lack mirror symmetry. We argue that chirality and natural optical activity of disordered systems can be quantified by the standard deviation of both rotatory power and spatial dichroism. Our results are based on microscopic electromagnetic wave transport theory coupled to vectorial Green's matrix method for pointlike scatterers, and are independently confirmed by full-wave simulations.