Minimal Model for Chirally Induced Spin Selectivity: Chirality, Spin-orbit coupling, Decoherence and Tunneling

TL;DR

This paper reviews a universal model explaining chirally induced spin selectivity (CISS) in molecules, emphasizing the roles of chirality, spin-orbit coupling, decoherence, and tunneling across various experimental setups.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, universal framework for understanding CISS, integrating diverse experimental results and highlighting key ingredients necessary for the effect.

Findings

CISS arises from chirality, spin-orbit coupling, decoherence, and tunneling.

The model unifies results from gas phase, monolayers, and transport experiments.

Recent evidence links CISS to enantiomer selectivity and chiroptical phenomena.

Abstract

Here we review a universal model for chirally induced spin-selectivity (CISS) as a standalone effect occurring in chiral molecules. We tie together the results of forward scattering in the gas phase to the results for photoelectrons in chiral self-assembled monolayers and the more contemporary results in two terminal transport setups. We discuss the ingredients that are necessarily present in all experiments to date, which we identify as: i) chirality, be it point, helical or configurational, ii) the spin-orbit coupling as the spin active coupling of atomic origin, iii) decoherence as a time-reversal symmetry breaking mechanism that avoids reciprocity relations in the linear regime and finally iv) tunneling that accounts for the magnitude of the spin polarization effect. This proposal does not discard other mechanisms that can yield comparable spin effects related to interactions of the molecule to contacts or substrates that have been proposed but that are less universal or apply to particular situations. Finally, we discuss recent results suggesting CISS as a molecular phenomenon in the real of enantiomer selectivity, coherent electron transfer, and spin effects in chiroptical activity.