Fundamentals and Applications of an Optical Theorem for Chiral Optical Fields

The helicity of light is of great interest in both fundamental research and in applications such as dichroism spectroscopy. Its time-harmonic formulation is directly proportional to the density of optical chirality. Recently, both an helicity optical theorem (HOT) and a chirality conservation law (CCL) have been formulated for arbitrary scatterers taking into account an underlying continuity equation of this quantity. We summarize these two equivalent fundamental laws and analyze their potential applications.