Strong coupling in chiral cavities: nonperturbative framework for enantiomer discrimination

Abstract

The development of efficient techniques to distinguish mirror images of chiral molecules (enantiomers) is very important in both chemistry and physics. Enantiomers share most molecular properties except, for instance, the absorption of circularly polarized light. Enantiomer purification is therefore a challenging task that requires specialized equipment. Strong coupling between quantized fields and matter (e.g. in optical cavities) is a promising technique to modify molecular processes in a non-invasive way. The modulation of molecular properties is achieved by changing the field characteristics. In this work, we investigate whether strong coupling to circularly polarized electromagnetic fields is a viable way to discriminate chiral molecules. To this end, we develop a nonperturbative framework to calculate the behavior of molecules in chiral cavities. We show that in this setting the enantiomers have different energies -- that is, one is more stable than the other. The field-induced energy differences are also shown to give rise to enantiospecific signatures in rotational spectra.

18 pages and 14 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Engineering flat bands in twisted-bilayer graphene away from the magic angle with chiral optical cavities
• Cavity engineering of solid-state materials without external driving
• Vacuum-Induced Symmetry Breaking of Chiral Enantiomer Formation in Chemical Reactions
• Metasurface-based hybrid optical cavities for chiral sensing
• Photon condensation, Van Vleck paramagnetism, and chiral cavities
• Classical Approaches to Chiral Polaritonics
• Angular Momentum-Dependent Spectral Shift in Chiral Vacuum Cavities
• Theory and Experiment of Chirality-induced Magnetic Nonreciprocity Manifested by Coupling Phase
• Macroscopic entanglement between localized domain walls inside a cavity
• The relevance of degenerate states in chiral polaritonics