Circular Dichroism in Off-Resonantly Coupled Plasmonic Nanosystems

Chiral plasmonic systems have been shown to exhibit large chiroptical responses, much larger than those found in molecular or solid state systems. In this Letter, we investigate the role of resonant coupling in such systems and whether the formation of collective plasmonic modes in a chiral assembly of metallic nanostructures is a necessary condition for chiroptical response. We show in experiment and simulation that off-resonant coupling between spectrally detuned nanostructures arranged with structural chirality leads to a clear but weak chiroptical response. We interpret our results in the framework of scattering between the individual constituents that in turn leads to a chiroptical farfield response. We envision that our results will allow further tuning and manipulation of chiroptical responses in plasmonic systems for tailored chiral light matter interaction.