Enantiosensitive steering of free-induction decay

Abstract

Chiral discrimination, a problem of vital importance, has recently become an emerging frontier in ultrafast physics, with remarkable progress achieved in multiphoton and strong-field regimes. Rydberg excitations, unavoidable in the strong-field regime and intentional for few-photon processes, arise in all these approaches. Here we show how to harness this ubiquitous feature by introducing a new phenomenon, enantiosensitive free-induction decay, steered by a tricolour chiral field at a gentle intensity, structured in space and time. We demonstrate theoretically that an excited chiral molecule accumulates an enantiosensitive phase due to perturbative interactions with the tricolour chiral field, resulting in a spatial phase gradient steering the free-induction decay in opposite directions for opposite enantiomers. Our work introduces a general, extremely sensitive, all-optical, enantiosensitive detection technique which avoids strong fields and takes full advantage of recent advances in structuring light.

References in corpus (5)

• Electromagnetic Angular Momentum
• Electromagnetic Force and Momentum
• Enantiomer-Specific State Transfer of Chiral Molecules
• Propensity rules for photoelectron circular dichroism in strong field ionization of chiral molecules
• Spatial control of extreme ultraviolet light with opto-optical phase modulation

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Ultrafast chirality: the road to efficient chiral measurements
• Strong laser physics, non-classical light states and quantum information science
• The Application of Tailored Fields for Studying Chirality and Symmetry
• Imprinting chirality on atoms using synthetic chiral light fields
• Single-shot Non-destructive Quantum Sensing for Gaseous Samples with Hundreds of Chiral Molecules
• Phase-matched locally chiral light for global control of chiral light-matter interaction
• Enantiosensitive exceptional points in open chiral systems