2025/10/09 by Dutra, Rafael S., Pinheiro, Felipe A., Ether, Diney S. +3
#FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.08428
We demonstrate that an effect phenomenologically analogous to circular dichroism can arise even for dielectric and isotropic chiral spherical particles. By analyzing the polarimetry of light scattered from a chiral, lossless microsphere illuminated with linearly polarized light, we show that the scattered light becomes nearly circularly polarized, exhibiting large, nonresonant values of the Stokes parameter S3 for a broad range of visible frequencies. This phenomenon occurs only in the Mie regime, with the microsphere radius comparable to the wavelength, and provided that the scattered light is collected by a high-NA objective lens, including non-paraxial Fourier components. Altogether, our findings offer a theoretical framework and motivation for an experimental demonstration of a novel chiroptical effect with isolated dielectric particles, with potential applications in enantioselection and characterization of single microparticles, each and every one with its own chiral response.