Enantio-specific Detection of Chiral Nano-Samples Using Photo-induced Force

Abstract

We propose a novel high resolution microscopy technique for enantio-specific detection of chiral samples down to sub-100 nm size, based on force measurement. We delve into the differential photo-induced optical force exerted on an achiral probe in the vicinity of a chiral sample, when left and right circularly polarized beams separately excite the sample-probe interactive system. We analytically prove that the differential force is entangled with the enantiomer type of the sample enabling enantio-specific detection of chiral inclusions. Moreover, we demonstrate that the differential force is linearly dependent on both the chiral response of the sample and the electric response of the tip and is inversely related to the quartic power of probe-sample distance. We provide physical insight into the transfer of optical activity from the chiral sample to the achiral tip based on a rigorous analytical approach. We support our theoretical achievements by several numerical examples, highlighting the potential application of the derived analytic properties. Lastly, we demonstrate the sensitivity of our method to enantio-specify nanoscale chiral samples with chirality parameter in the order of 0.01, and discuss how this could be further improved.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Spin-orbit interactions and chiroptical effects engaging orbital angular momentum of twisted light in chiral and achiral media
• Near-Field Nanoprobing Using Si Tip-Au Nanoparticle Photoinduced Force Microscopy with 120:1 Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Sub-6-nm Resolution
• Tailoring optical pulling forces with composite microspheres
• Unscrambling Structured Chirality with Structured Light at Nanoscale Using Photo-induced Force
• Theory of optical forces on small particles by multiple plane waves