Chaos-induced optical chirality

Chirality and chaos, both rooted in symmetry breaking, have been long intriguing in fundamental and applied physics. Despite their shared foundation, these two fundamental concepts have largely evolved independently, leaving unexplored potential at their intersection. Here, we report chaos-induced optical chirality in a quantum-dot microlaser, establishing the first direct link between these fundamental phenomena. We reveal that chaotic light dynamics breaks time-reversal symmetry, creating locally imbalanced intensities between counterpropagating cavity modes. By integrating a chirality transformer into the microcavity, this local imbalance is transformed into global chirality, producing highly directional intracavity lasing fields with a measured counterpropagating power ratio exceeding 10 dB. Remarkably, this chaos-induced chirality exhibits exceptional robustness to variations in the transformer’s position and universality across different cavity boundary shapes, surpassing the versatility of conventional approaches, thus paving the way for innovative chiral photonic devices, unidirectional quantum networks and beyond.