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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 6: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses II

A 6.1: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 15. März 2022, 10:30–11:00, A-H1

Synthetic chiral light for control of achiral and chiral media — •Nicola Mayer¹, David Ayuso^{1, 2}, Misha Ivanov¹, and Olga Smirnova¹ — ¹Max-Born-Institut, Berlin, Germany — ²Imperial College, London, United Kingdom

Light that is chiral in the dipole approximation can be synthetized by combining two or more beams with commensurate frequencies in a non-collinear or tightly-focused setup. The interaction of this particular type of light with a chiral sample leads to giant enantio-sensitive responses [1]. Moreover, the combination of chiral light with Gaussian beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) gives rise to vortexes with azimuthally-varying handedness [2]. Here, we demonstrate new ways in which synthetic chiral can be used to shape the response in both achiral and chiral media. Specifically, we demonstrate the excitation of time-dependent chiral superpositions of atomic states whose handedness can be probed by standard Photoelectron Circular Dichroism methods [3]. Moreover, we demonstrate that chiral OAM beams shape the near- and far-field high-harmonic generation (HHG) signal from isotropic samples of chiral molecules in a topological manner, i.e. the spatial distribution of the HHG signal is described by an integer topological charge.

[1] D. Ayuso et al., Nat. Phot., 2019, 13 (12), 866-871

[2] N. Mayer et al., Chiral topological light, in preparation

[3] N. Mayer et al., Imprinting chirality on atoms using synthetic chiral light, arXiv:2112.02658