Unified light-matter metric of molecular and nanophotonic chirality

Abstract

Signatures of a material object's broken inversion symmetry within its intrinsic excitations and associated optical fields have evaded characterization from a perspective that evenly accounts for the inseparability between matter and field. Here, we formulate a complex-valued pseudoscalar chirality metric that is derived from the coupled electromagnetic and material governing equations, and demonstrate its resolution of the excitational chirality exhibited by the eigenmodes and eigenfields of a family of structurally chiral objects, including those with chirally connected enantiomeric states.