Linearly and Circularly Polarized Probes of Second-Order Optical Activity of Chiral Surfaces

Abstract

It was recently observed experimentally that second-harmonic generation (SHG) from chiral surfaces is sensitive to the handedness of the incoming fundamental light. This phenomena is called nonlinear optical activity1,2. We have subsequently developed a theory of SHG from chiral surfaces that includes contributions of electric- and magnetic-dipole transitions to the surface nonlinearity. The theory can be used to explain the experimental results very well3-5.