At the nanoscale, spatial dispersion becomes a design tool: artificially engineered, essentially Hermitian metamaterials with strong non-local response enable deterministic control of light–matter interaction, including its chiral degrees of freedom.
By driving topological transitions in their dispersion—from elliptic to hyperbolic and into the epsilon-near-zero limit where the refractive index approaches zero—we can manipulate visible-range plasmons and polaritons, flatten optical phase, and access slow-light and energy-squeezing regimes while simultaneously tailoring local optical chirality and superchiral near fields.
These optical extremes magnify field confinement, radiation pressure, and chiral light–matter coupling, enabling Meissner-like expulsion of displacement fields, electric-levitation behavior, and prospects for enantioselective optomechanical forces. I will outline the underlying physics, practical design rules, and recent experiments that turn these concepts into robust platforms for photonics, chiral sensing, and chiral optomechanics.