Enantiosensitive steering of free-induction decay

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel all-optical method for enantiosensitive detection of chiral molecules using a tricolour chiral field to steer free-induction decay, avoiding strong fields and leveraging structured light.

Contribution

The work presents the concept of enantiosensitive free-induction decay steered by a structured tricolour chiral field, enabling sensitive chiral discrimination with gentle light intensities.

Findings

Theoretical demonstration of enantiosensitive phase accumulation in chiral molecules.

Spatial phase gradient causes opposite free-induction decay directions for enantiomers.

Method exploits structured light for sensitive, all-optical chiral detection.

Abstract

Chiral discrimination, a problem of vital importance, has recently become an emerging frontier in ultrafast physics, with remarkable progress achieved in multiphoton and strong-field regimes. Rydberg excitations, unavoidable in the strong-field regime and intentional for few-photon processes, arise in all these approaches. Here we show how to harness this ubiquitous feature by introducing a new phenomenon, enantiosensitive free-induction decay, steered by a tricolour chiral field at a gentle intensity, structured in space and time. We demonstrate theoretically that an excited chiral molecule accumulates an enantiosensitive phase due to perturbative interactions with the tricolour chiral field, resulting in a spatial phase gradient steering the free-induction decay in opposite directions for opposite enantiomers. Our work introduces a general, extremely sensitive, all-optical, enantiosensitive detection technique which avoids strong fields and takes full advantage of recent advances in structuring light.