Hannover 2020 – scientific programme
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SYCU: Symposium Chirality meets ultrafast
SYCU 1: Chirality meets Ultrafast
SYCU 1.4: Invited Talk
Monday, March 9, 2020, 12:30–13:00, e415
Synthetic chiral light for efficient control of chiral light-matter interaction — •David Ayuso1, Ofer Neufeld2, Andres F. Ordonez1,3, Piero Decleva4, Gavriel Lerner2, Oren Cohen2, Misha Ivanov1,5,6, and Olga Smirnova1,3 — 1Max-Born-Institut, Berlin, Germany — 2Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel — 3Technische Universität Berlin, Germany — 4Università di Trieste, Italy — 5Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany — 6Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Chiral discrimination is hard, especially on ultrafast time scales. Standard optical methods rely on the molecules feeling the helix that circularly polarized light creates in space. However, the pitch of this helix is much larger than the molecules, and chiral response is weak.
We have recently introduced synthetic chiral light [1], a new type of freely-propagating optical fields in which the tip of the electric field vector draws a chiral, three-dimensional Lissajous curve in time, at each fixed point in space. Such light is locally chiral: unlike circularly polarized light, its chirality does not rely on the spatial helix of the light field. Thus, it remains chiral in the dipole approximation. Here I will show how to generate such light practically, how to characterize and control its handedness, and how to maintain it globally, across the entire interaction region. Synthetic chiral light enables the highest possible degree of control over the enantio-sensitive nonlinear optical response at the level of total signal intensities, opening efficient ways for imaging and controlling chiral matter on ultrafast time scales.
[1] D. Ayuso et al, Nat. Phot. 13, 866 (2019)