Enhanced chiral response of hybrid photonic structures empowered by Mie resonances

Abstract

Chiroptical response provides a powerful route to control light-matter interactions through light handedness, with crucial importance in polarization control, chiral sensing, and nonlinear photonics. Hybrid structures may offer a novel route to engineer such responses by coupling plasmonic field localization with dielectric Mie resonances within a single nanostructure. However, in chiral metasurfaces, hybridization has largely been treated as a means of resonance enhancement, while its role in actively reshaping and reversing intrinsic plasmonic chirality remains largely unexplored. Here, we demonstrate a hybrid metasurface in which a dielectric Mie resonance mediates enhanced chiral response of plasmonic building blocks. By coupling a Si nanocylinder to trapezoidal Au nanobars, a weak and mode-selective plasmonic chiral seed is reorganised into two opposite-handed hybrid resonances, producing near-unity circular dichroism with spectral sign flipping. Extending this mechanism to nonlinear regime, the same hybrid-mode selectivity produces strongly nonlinear chiral emission and near-unity third-harmonic generation circular dichroism of either sign. We believe these results establish plasmonic-Mie hybridization as a novel mechanism for engineering high-purity, sign-switchable linear and nonlinear chirality in compact metadevices.