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When circularly polarized light interacts with a nanostructure, the optical response depends on the geometry of the structure. If the nanostructure is chiral (i.e., it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image), then its optical response, both in near-field and far-field, depends on the handedness of the incident light. In contrast, achiral structures exhibit identical far-field responses for left- and right-circular polarization. Here, we show that a perfectly achiral nanostructure, a plasmonic metamolecule with trigonal D3h symmetry, exhibits a near-field response that is sensitive to the handedness of light. This effect stems from the near-field interference between the different plasmonic modes sustained by the plasmonic metamolecule under circularly polarized light excitation. The local chirality in a plasmonic trimer is then experimentally evidenced with nanoscale resolution using a molecular probe. Our experiments demonstrate that the optical near-field chirality can be imprinted into the photosensitive polymer, turning an optical chirality into a geometrical chirality that can be imaged using atomic force microscopy. These results are of interest for the field of polarization-sensitive photochemistry.

The 2020 Personalized Voice Trigger Challenge (PVTC2020) addresses two different research problems a unified setup: joint wake-up word detection with speaker verification on close-talking single microphone data and far-field multi-channel microphone array data. Specially, the second task poses an additional cross-channel matching challenge on top of the far-field condition. To simulate the real-life application scenario, the enrollment utterances are recorded from close-talking cell-phone only, while the test utterances are recorded from both the close-talking cell-phone and the far-field microphone arrays. This paper introduces our challenge setup and the released database as well as the evaluation metrics. In addition, we present a joint end-to-end neural network baseline system trained with the proposed database for speaker-dependent wake-up word detection. Results show that the cost calculated from the miss rate and the false alarm rate, can reach 0.37 in the close-talking single microphone task and 0.31 in the far-field microphone array task. The official website and the open-source baseline system have been released.