Our paper on “Plasmonic nanohelix metamaterials with tailorable giant circular dichroism” is the featured cover article for the Applied Physics Letters Issue 21, vol. 103, 18 November 2013.
Plasmonic nanohelix arrays are shown to interact with electromagnetic fields in ways not typically seen with ordinary matter. Chiral metamaterials (CMMs) with feature sizes small with respect to the wavelength of visible light are a promising route to experimentally achieve such phenomena as negative refraction without the need for simultaneously negative ε and μ. Here we not only show that giant circular dichroism in the visible is achievable with hexagonally arranged plasmonic nanohelix arrays, but that we can precisely tune the optical activityvia morphology and lattice spacing. The discrete dipole approximation is implemented to support experimental data.