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Physical Review A

Near-perfect discrimination of chiral molecules based on steady states of a cavity mode

Yi‐Hao Kang, Zhe-Ping Lin, Jianqun Yang, Jie Song, Yan Xia

Published May 26, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a protocol to realize discrimination of chiral molecules based on steady states of a cavity mode. Using the closed-loop three-level structure of a molecule, an effective Hamiltonian of the molecule-cavity-coupled system is derived. The effective Hamiltonian is similar to a linear driving of the cavity mode, but the driving strength depends on the chirality of the molecule. In the presence of photon loss, the cavity behaves like a driven damped harmonic oscillator, and it will evolve to different steady coherence states according to the chirality of the molecule. By selecting proper parameters, it is possible to obtain steady coherence states with large-enough amplitudes that can be well determined by homodyne measurements on the cavity. Consequently, the chirality of the molecules can be discriminated near perfectly, according to the measurement result of the cavity. Numerical simulations show that the protocol is insensitive to the systematic errors of the control fields and the energy relaxation of the molecules. Therefore, the protocol may provide an effective approach to realize chirality discrimination with high accuracy.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.107.053714

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We propose a method to realize enantiodiscrimination of chiral molecules based on quantum correlation function in a driven cavity-molecule system, where the chiral molecule is coupled with a quantized cavity field and two classical light fields to form a cyclic three-level model. According to the inherent properties of electric-dipole transition moments of chiral molecules, there is a π-phase difference in the overall phase of the cyclic three-level model for the left- and right-handed chiral molecules. Thus, the correlation function depends on this overall phase and is chirality-dependent. The analytical and numerical results indicate that the left- and right-handed chiral molecules can be discriminated by detecting quantum correlation function. Our work opens up a promising route to discriminate molecular chirality, which is an extremely important task in pharmacology and biochemistry.
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We propose a scheme for chirality discrimination via a topological invariant. The physical model is based on a three-level subspace of a molecule. By modulating the components of the control field with proper frequencies, two different two-level effective Hamiltonians are derived for the left-handed and the right-handed molecules. We parameterize the effective Hamiltonians with two angles and demonstrate that a topological quantum phase transition can be induced by tuning the effective Rabi frequency if the molecule is right-handed. This phenomenon provides a method to discriminate the chirality of the molecule by measuring a topological invariant, i.e., the Chern number, of the parametric manifold. Since the Chern number is robust against perturbations to the system, the scheme is insensitive to the systematic errors of the control fields, the deviations of the modulation frequencies, and decoherence of the molecule. Therefore, the scheme may provide useful perspectives to construct a robust discriminator of chiral molecules.
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