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Hmmm. I can see that I need to speak more directly to David's discomfort with
the description I gave which mentioned optically active materials.
1) It is not quite appropriate (in my view) to allude to particals
(or even particles) when one is discussing a facet of electromagnetic
radiation which is evidently wave-like.
2) The quotation given by David as emanating from Voss is clearly wrong.
I hasten to add that its 'wrongness' may issue only from an incompleteness
of the quotation.
To justify this bald assertion, I repeat that it is a fundamental
requirement of any helically polarized electromagnetic radiation (which is
often called circularly polarized) that it must be analyzable into two
orthogonally polarized components which differ in phase by a quarter wave
at the frequency of interest.
Let me make this quite clear: the superposition of two waves of one
quarter wave phase difference but of the same polarization leads only to a
non-rotating wave of intermediate phase. This is David's principal error,
in my view.