Chirality Inversion and Giant Optical Activity in Scalable Self-Assembled Metamaterials
Abstract
Chiral materials manipulate light in ways that hold promise for sensing, imaging, and photonics, but producing such materials with strong and reproducible optical activity at large scale remains challenging. Here, we develop a scalable strategy to assemble hierarchical helicoidal metamaterials from metallic nanoparticles and chitin nanocrystals, a biosourced polysaccharide. Spontaneous co-assembly produces ordered chiral structures with strong plasmonic optical activity, reaching a dissymmetry factor of 0.55. The unprecedented ability to vary the helicoidal pitch allows control of the optical response, enabling inversion of optical handedness without changing the handedness of the template, effectively decoupling geometrical chirality from optical chirality. Remarkably, the gold nanoparticles can also be recovered from dry films and redispersed as colloids, introducing an appealing circularity concept for sustainable chiral plasmonic materials.
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BibTeX
@misc{carone2026chirality,
title = {{Chirality Inversion and Giant Optical Activity in Scalable Self-Assembled Metamaterials}},
author = {Antonio Carone and Aso Rahimzadegan and Birgül Kalkan and Thomas G. Parton and Tony Jin and Zihao Lu and Clemens Schmitt and Emeline Raguin and Bruno Frka-Petesic and Kevin Vynck and Silvia Vignolini},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18116},
eprint = {2610.18116},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18116},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Chirality Inversion and Giant Optical Activity in Scalable Self-Assembled Metamaterials
AU - Antonio Carone
AU - Aso Rahimzadegan
AU - Birgül Kalkan
AU - Thomas G. Parton
AU - Tony Jin
AU - Zihao Lu
AU - Clemens Schmitt
AU - Emeline Raguin
AU - Bruno Frka-Petesic
AU - Kevin Vynck
AU - Silvia Vignolini
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18116
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18116
AB - Chiral materials manipulate light in ways that hold promise for sensing, imaging, and photonics, but producing such materials with strong and reproducible optical activity at large scale remains challenging. Here, we develop a scalable strategy to assemble hierarchical helicoidal metamaterials from metallic nanoparticles and chitin nanocrystals, a biosourced polysaccharide. Spontaneous co-assembly produces ordered chiral structures with strong plasmonic optical activity, reaching a dissymmetry factor of 0.55. The unprecedented ability to vary the helicoidal pitch allows control of the optical response, enabling inversion of optical handedness without changing the handedness of the template, effectively decoupling geometrical chirality from optical chirality. Remarkably, the gold nanoparticles can also be recovered from dry films and redispersed as colloids, introducing an appealing circularity concept for sustainable chiral plasmonic materials.
ER -