SAMOP 2021 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 3: Chirality
MO 3.4: Talk
Tuesday, September 21, 2021, 11:45–12:00, H3
Structuring light's chirality to induce enantio-sensitive light bending — •Andrés Ordóñez1,2, David Ayuso1,3, Piero Decleva4, Misha Ivanov1,3, and Olga Smirnova1,5 — 1Max-Born-Institut, Berlin, Germany — 2ICFO, Barcelona, Spain — 3Imperial College London, London, UK — 4Università degli studi di Trieste, Trieste, Italy — 5Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
We show how to structure light's local chirality, a new type of chirality which is effective within the electric-dipole approximation and is relevant for non-linear light-matter interactions. We introduce and realize an enantio-sensitive interferometer for efficient chiral recognition without magnetic interactions, which can be seen as an enantio-sensitive version of Young's double slit experiment. We show that if the distribution of light's handedness breaks left-right symmetry, the interference of chiral and achiral parts of the molecular response leads to unidirectional bending of the emitted light, in opposite directions in media of opposite handedness. Our work introduces the concepts of polarization of chirality and chirality-polarized light, exposes the immense potential of sculpting light's local chirality, and offers novel opportunities for efficient chiral discrimination and imaging on ultrafast time scales in the highly non-linear regime of light-matter interaction.