Chiral polaritonics: cavity-mediated enantioselective excitation condensation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that chiral cavities can induce enantiospecific effects and collective phenomena in molecular systems, enabling enantioselective photochemistry through strong light-matter coupling.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of chiral polaritonics, showing how circularly polarized cavities can cause enantiospecific Rabi splittings and excitation condensation.

Findings

Enantiospecific Rabi splittings observed in chiral cavities.

Asymmetry in enantiomer population of polaritons due to entanglement.

Potential for driving asymmetric photochemistry in enantiomeric mixtures.

Abstract

Separation of the two mirror images of a chiral molecule, the enantiomers, is a historically complicated problem of major relevance for biological systems. Since chiral molecules are optically active, it has been speculated that strong coupling to circularly polarized fields may be used as a general procedure to unlock enantiospecific reactions. In this work, we focus on how chiral cavities can be used to drive asymmetry in the photochemistry of chiral molecular systems. We first show that strong coupling to circularly polarized fields leads to enantiospecific Rabi splittings, an effect that displays a collective behavior in line with other strong coupling phenomena. Additionally, entanglement with circularly polarized light generates an asymmetry in the enantiomer population of the polaritons, leading to a condensation of the excitation on a preferred molecular configuration. These results confirm that chiral cavities represent a tantalizing opportunity to drive asymmetric photochemistry in enantiomeric mixtures.