Chiral plasmonic nanomaterials can have circular dichroism and optical rotatory dispersion effects orders of magnitude larger than those observed in ordinary chiral molecules. Understanding this fascinating class of materials has proved challenging and has motivated several research groups to develop entirely new experimental techniques for characterizing chirality driven optical properties. In this review, we first describe the classical method of circular dichroism which measures linear, far-field responses from an ensemble population. We then go on to describe several of the more recently developed methods to probe chiral nanostructures as they expand into the domains of non-linear, near-field, and single particle measurements including spatially and spectrally resolved techniques.

手性等离激元纳米材料的圆二色性和旋光色散效应可能比在普通手性分子中观察到的要大几个数量级。理解这种引人入胜的材料类别已证明具有挑战性，并激励了几个研究小组开发全新的实验技术来表征手性驱动的光学性质。在这篇评论中，我们首先描述了圆二色性的经典方法，该方法测量来自整体群体的线性，远场响应。然后，我们将继续描述一些手性纳米结构，它们将扩展到非线性，近场和单粒子测量领域，包括空间和光谱解析技术，这些方法可用于探测手性纳米结构。