SAMOP 2021 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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SYCU: Symposium Chirality meets ultrafast
SYCU 1: Chirality meets ultrafast
SYCU 1.4: Hauptvortrag
Dienstag, 21. September 2021, 15:00–15:30, Audimax
Chiral molecules in an optical centrifuge — •Valery Milner1, Alexander Milner1, Ilia Tutunnikov2, and Ilya Averbukh2 — 1Department of Physics & Astronomy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada — 2Department of Chemical and Biological Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
The fundamental importance of molecular chirality drives the search for novel techniques of enantioselective control, detection, and separation of chiral molecules. It has been recently predicted that an optical centrifuge - a laser pulse, whose linear polarization undergoes an accelerated rotation around its propagation direction, may orient chiral molecules in the laboratory frame, with the orientation axis dependent on the handedness of the enantiomer. Here we present the first experimental observation of this phenomenon [1,2] in propylene oxide molecules. The demonstrated technique offers not only an alternative way of differentiating between molecular enantiomers, but also a new approach to enantioselective manipulation of chiral molecules with light. We discuss the efficiency of the method and the ways to improve it further with new techniques of rotational excitation and detection of the directional molecular rotation.
[1] A. A. Milner, J. Fordyce, I. MacPhail-Bartley, W. Wasserman, V. Milner, I. Tutunnikov and I. Sh. Averbukh, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 223201 (2019).
[2] I. Tutunnikov, J. Floß, E. Gershnabel, P. Brumer, I. Sh. Averbukh, A. A. Milner and V. Milner, Phys. Rev. A 101, 021403(R) (2020).