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arXiv:2406.09303

All-optically tunable enantio-selectivity and chirality transfer

Li, En-Ze, Mingxin Dong, Dong-Sheng Ding, Bao‐Sen Shi, Guang‐Can Guo, Franco Nori

Published Jun 13, 2024• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Detecting and controlling the chirality of materials play an essential role in exploring nature, providing new avenues for material creation, discrimination, and manipulation. In such tasks, chiral reagents are essential in defining or enhancing the chiral dichroism response. However, ignoring their influences on the symmetry of the medium hamper the ability to control and induce asymmetric synthesis. Here, we propose a simple but versatile chirality transfer method for synthesizing and manipulating the chirality of medium. The proposed method induces the dispersion of light in a neutral atomic system, allowing to deterministically and tunably control the chirality transfer using a helical field. First, we theoretically analyze the mechanism for this optically induced chirality transfer. Afterwards, we experimentally study the enantio-sensitive feature of the medium exposed to the auxiliary chiral field. This result can be suppressed or enhanced in a deterministic enantio-selection, opening up an efficient way to manipulate asymmetric synthesis.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2406.09303

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Detecting and controlling the chirality of materials play an essential role in exploring nature, providing new avenues for material creation, discrimination, and manipulation. In such tasks, chiral reagents are essential in defining or enhancing the chiral dichroism response. However, ignoring their influences on the symmetry of the medium hamper the ability to control and induce asymmetric synthesis. Here, we propose a simple but versatile chirality transfer method for synthesizing and manipulating the chirality of medium. The proposed method induces the dispersion of light in a neutral atomic system, allowing to deterministically and tunably control the chirality transfer using a helical field. First, we theoretically analyze the mechanism for this optically induced chirality transfer. Afterwards, we experimentally study the enantio-sensitive feature of the medium exposed to the auxiliary chiral field. This result can be suppressed or enhanced in a deterministic enantio-selection, opening up an efficient way to manipulate asymmetric synthesis.
Detecting and controlling the chirality of matter play an essential role in exploring nature, providing previously unexplored avenues for matter discrimination and quantum manipulation. In such tasks, chiral probes are essential in defining or enhancing the chiral dichroism response. However, overlooking their influence on the symmetry of the medium hampers the ability to deterministically induce electromagnetic chirality. Here, we propose a simple yet versatile all-optical chirality transfer method to generate and manipulate the electromagnetic chirality of a neutral atomic medium. By inducing chirality-dependent dispersion in the atomic system, our method enables deterministic and tunable control of chirality transfer via a helical field. We theoretically analyze the mechanism of this optically induced symmetry breaking and experimentally demonstrate the helicity-dependent response of the medium. Our results show that the induced chirality can be effectively suppressed or enhanced, enabling deterministic electromagnetic enantioselection. This approach opens an efficient pathway for manipulating chiral symmetry breaking in light-matter interactions.
Birefringence and dichroism in atomic systems are active areas of research. Circular dichroism is typically observed in chiral atoms, molecules (such as DNA), and optically asymmetric materials. These phenomena enable polarization-based selectivity and high-precision measurements with applications in optical systems, biomedical diagnostics, and advanced photonics.Meanwhile, negative refractive index materials offer exotic applications in optics and photonics, including super-resolution imaging, invisibility cloaking, and sub-wavelength imaging. Here, we identify a novel route to achieving birefringence and dichroism in a left-handed system for the first time.We investigate the optical activity of an atomic left-handed medium, analyzing the interaction of left- and right-circularly polarized light with different atomic states while incorporating local field corrections. Notably, our results demonstrate simultaneous left-handedness for both polarization states. Furthermore, we find that electric birefringence and dichroism are significantly enhanced with increasing control field strength, while magnetic birefringence and dichroism can be fully controlled via strong laser coupling.These findings have promising implications for spintronics, image transmission in metamaterials, and the development of optical switches and high-speed data transmission devices, opening new avenues in quantum optics and photonics.
Birefringence and dichroism in atomic systems are active areas of research. Circular dichroism is typically observed in chiral atoms, molecules (such as DNA), and optically asymmetric materials. These phenomena enable polarization-based selectivity and high-precision measurements with applications in optical systems, biomedical diagnostics, and advanced photonics. Meanwhile, negative-refractive-index materials offer exotic applications in optics and photonics, including superresolution imaging, invisibility cloaking, and subwavelength imaging. Here we identify a route to achieving birefringence and dichroism in a left-handed system. We investigate the optical activity of an atomic left-handed medium, analyzing the interaction of left- and right-circularly polarized light with different atomic states while incorporating local field corrections. Notably, our results demonstrate simultaneous left-handedness for both polarization states. Furthermore, we find that electric birefringence and dichroism are significantly enhanced with increasing control field strength, while magnetic birefringence and dichroism can be fully controlled via strong laser coupling. These findings have promising implications in fields at the interface of left-handedness and dichroism.
Enantio-conversion with the help of electromagnetic fields is an essential issue due to the chirality dependence of many chemical, biological, and pharmaceutical processes. Here, we propose a method for this issue based on a five-level double-$\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ model of chiral molecules. By utilizing the breaking of left-right symmetry in two $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$-type substructures, we can establish chiral-state-selective excitations with one chiral ground state being excited to an achiral excited state and the other one being undisturbed. In the meanwhile, the achiral excited state will relax to two chiral ground states. The two effects simultaneously acting on chiral mixtures can convert molecules of different chiralities to ones of the same chirality, i.e., enantio-conversion via optical pumping. We numerically show that highly efficient enantio-conversion can be achieved. Our method works in the appearance of decoherences and without the precise control of pulse durations (pulse areas) or pulse shapes. These advantages offer it promising features in promoting the future exploration of enantio-conversion.
We propose a theoretical method for enantio-discrimination based on the light deflection effect in four-level models of chiral molecules. This four-level model consists of a cyclic three-level subsystem coupled by three strong driving fields and an auxiliary level connected to the cyclic three-level subsystem by a weak probe field. It is shown that the induced refractive index for the weak probe field is chirality-dependent. Thus, it will lead to chirality-dependent light deflection when the intensities of two of the three strong driving fields are spatially inhomogeneous. As a result, the deflection angle of the weak probe light can be utilized to detect the chirality of pure enantiomers and enantiomeric excess of the chiral mixture. Therefore, our method may act as a tool for enantio-discrimination.
Chiral materials possess some unusual properties which make them interesting for useful applications in nanophotonics. In this work, we review the basic techniques used to achieve electromagnetically induced chirality in initially isotropic materials and mention some of their novel operations. Next, we investigate the transmission characteristics of two different multi-level atomic models in which chirality is introduced by magnetoelectric cross coupling of external electromagnetic fields with atomic transitions, leading to quantum coherence. The left-(lcp) and right-circularly polarized (rcp) beams, the two eigenmodes of a chiral medium, are shown to transmit in an anti-symmetric manner with respect to the probe field detuning and control field magnitude variations. This selective transmission of a particular mode at specific detunings may find applications in optical isolation and storage. We further demonstrate that the driving control fields and their effective phase can be used as tuning knobs to manipulate the medium's birefringence and the transmission of the eigenmodes.