Analysis of rainbow and polarization characteristics of chiral sphere

The theoretical results of the first rainbow of chiral dielectric sphere are presented. On the basis of the spherical vector wave functions, the rainbow of a homogeneous chiral sphere to a plane wave is investigated. The intensity distribution of the first or second rainbow of isotropic sphere is very obvious using ray tracing theory, but the characteristics of each rainbow for a chiral sphere with larger size parameter are hard to judge, thus, they are studied numerically in this paper. Moreover, the influence of chiral parameter on the line polarization and circular polarization properties is also numerically analyzed.