Strong coupling of a chiral molecule with circularly polarised modes inside a cavity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chiral molecules interact differently with circularly polarised cavity modes, deriving the Rabi frequency and Casimir--Polder potential, revealing discriminatory effects based on handedness.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized Jaynes--Cummings model including electric and magnetic dipole couplings to analyze chiral molecule-cavity interactions.

Findings

Discriminatory interaction depends on relative handedness.

Derived Rabi frequency and Casimir--Polder potential show handedness dependence.

Extended model to cavities with two modes of different handedness.

Abstract

We consider the discriminatory interaction of a chiral molecule with circularly polarised modes inside a cavity. Starting from a generalised Jaynes--Cummings model that includes both electric and magnetic dipole couplings, we derive the Rabi frequency and associated Casimir--Polder potential for a cavity with a single mode of given handedness. One finds that both acquire a discriminatory component whose sign depends on the relative handedness of molecule and cavity mode. We generalise this result to a cavity that supports two modes of different handedness on the basis of superradiant collective field states.