Enantiodetection in a cavity QED setup with finite chiral molecules

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cavity QED-based method for detecting enantiomeric excess in chiral molecules by leveraging interference effects, achieving high accuracy with a novel simulation approach for many-molecule systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new enantiodetection scheme using cavity QED that exploits phase differences and employs a generalized discrete truncated Wigner approximation for many-molecule analysis.

Findings

Achieves enantiomeric excess readout with less than 5% error.

Employs a generalized discrete truncated Wigner approximation for mesoscopic systems.

Demonstrates feasibility of enantiodetection in realistic quantum optical setups.

Abstract

We investigate enantiodetection for both a single cyclic three-level chiral molecule and finite ensembles of such molecules by monitoring the steady-state intracavity photon number in a cavity-QED platform. Our scheme exploits the intrinsic global $\pi$-phase difference between opposite enantiomers to engineer destructive and/or constructive interference pathways, enabling a direct readout of enantiomeric excess with an error below $5\%$. To capture mesoscopic many-molecule effects beyond mean field while avoiding brute-force master-equation simulations, we employ a generalized discrete truncated Wigner approximation, which is well suited for systems with many yet finite molecules. These results pave the way for implementing enantiodetection in realistic quantum-optical settings.