Planar chirality and optical spin-orbit coupling for chiral Fabry-Perot cavities

Abstract

We design, in a most simple way, Fabry-Perot cavities with longitudinal chiral modes by sandwiching between two smooth metallic silver mirrors a layer of polystyrene made planar chiral by torsional shear stress. We demonstrate that the helicity-preserving features of our cavities stem from a spin-orbit coupling mechanism seeded inside the cavities by the specific chiroptical features of planar chirality. Planar chirality gives rise to an extrinsic source of three-dimensional chirality under oblique illumination that endows the cavities with enantiomorphic signatures measured experimentally and simulated with excellent agreement. The simplicity of our scheme is particularly promising in the context of chiral cavity QED and polaritonic asymmetric chemistry.