Optical activity of semiconductor nanocrystals with ionic impurities

Abstract

The strength of the enantioselective interaction of chiral semiconductor nanocrystals with circularly polarized light can be varied over a wide range, which finds a series of important applications in modern nanophotonics. As a rule, this interaction is relatively weak, because the dimension of nanocrystals is much smaller than the wavelength of the optical radiation, and the optical activity of nanocrystals is rather low. In this work, we show theoretically that, by applying ion doping, one can significantly enhance the optical activity of nanocrystals and to vary its magnitude over a wide range of values and over a wide range of frequencies. We show that, by precisely arranging impurities inside nanocrystals, one can optimize the rotatory strengths of intraband transitions, making them 100 times stronger than typical rotatory strengths of small chiral molecules.