Chirality-selective optical transport of nanoparticles in the evanescent field of a nanofiber

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that chiral optical modes in nanofibers can selectively transport and separate chiral nanoparticles, such as gold nanocubes, based on their handedness, enabling potential enantio-selective manipulation at the nanoscale.

Contribution

It introduces a method using chiral evanescent fields in nanofibers for chirality-selective optical transport of nanoparticles, supported by experiments and simulations.

Findings

Distinct velocities for left- and right-handed nanocubes in chiral modes

Non-chiral particles show no velocity dissymmetry

Effective enantio-selective transport with counterpropagating modes

Abstract

Optical nanofibers are waveguides known for their unique property to produce intense evanescent fields which have subwavelength transverse confinement easily extendable over thousands of wavelengths along the fiber axis. Moreover, circularly polarized fundamental modes of a nanofiber are chiral, that is, lacking mirror symmetry. Here, we use these two properties to demonstrate chirality-selective optical transport of a waterborne chiral material object - a chemically synthesized gold nanocube with twisted faces. Our experiments, supported by numerical simulations, show that right- and left-handed circularly polarized modes produce clearly distinct velocities of optically trapped nanocubes along the nanofiber axis, whereas non-chiral gold nanospheres of a similar size do not show any such dissymmetry. Furthermore, using a counterpropagating mode configuration, the non-chiral component of the optical force can be effectively zeroed out, yielding selective forward and backward transport of chiral nanocubes. In addition, the chiral optical force was found to be significant even for particle ensembles with natural variations in size and form, showing average behavior in agreement with numerical simulations. This is a clear implementation of optical separation of chiral enantiomers at the scale of 100 nm. Further development towards waveguide-assisted enantio-selective manipulation approaching the molecular scale can be envisaged.