Inverse-Designed Superchiral Hot Spot in Dielectric Meta-Cavity for Ultra-Compact Enantioselective Detection
in: Advanced Optical Materials (2026)
Chiral nanophotonic structures have garnered considerable interest in recent years due to their potential to enhance the efficacy of chirality-sensitive biomolecular detection. Designing metaplatforms to enhance chiroptical signals under linearly polarized excitation is particularly appealing due to the minimal chiral background and the ease of controlling excitation polarization. Here, a novel two-step inverse design scheme for dielectric lossless metasurfaces with superchiral hot spots is proposed. The method extends the local density of field enhancements for non-chiral fields into the chiral regime and significantly surpasses previous enhancements in superchiral field generation. It has been demonstrated that by leveraging the excitation of high-quality factor modes with small mode volumes, it is theoretically possible to convert linearly polarized plane waves into a superchiral hot spot with record-high enhancement in the near-field optical chirality up to 104 . A prototype is successfully implemented using advanced nanofabrication technologies. The optical characterization of the prototype demonstrates a 102 -fold enhancement in optical chirality. The findings of this study unveil novel prospects for chiral spectroscopy with ultra-compact devices, underscoring the role of machine learning and physics-based inverse design in the development of cutting-edge, functional photonic structures.
DOI: 10.1002/adom.71846