Abstract
Structured light, which exhibits nontrivial intensity, phase, and polarization patterns in space, has key applications ranging from imaging and 3D micromanipulation to classical and quantum communication. However, to date, its application to molecular chirality has been limited by the weakness of magnetic interactions. Here we structure light’s local handedness in space to introduce and realize an enantio-sensitive interferometer for efficient chiral recognition without magnetic interactions, which can be seen as an enantio-sensitive version of Young’s double slit experiment. Upon interaction with isotropic chiral media, such chirality-structured light effectively creates chiral emitters of opposite handedness, located at different positions in space. We show that if the distribution of light’s handedness breaks left-right symmetry, the interference of these chiral emitters leads to unidirectional bending of the emitted light, in opposite directions in media of opposite handedness, even if the number of the left-handed and right-handed emitters excited in the medium is exactly the same. Our work introduces the concepts of polarization of chirality and chirality-polarized light, exposes the immense potential of sculpting light’s local chirality, and offers novel opportunities for efficient chiral discrimination, enantio-sensitive optical molecular fingerprinting and imaging on ultrafast time scales.
Highlights
Structured light, which exhibits nontrivial intensity, phase, and polarization patterns in space, has key applications ranging from imaging and 3D micromanipulation to classical and quantum communication
The chiral Young’s double-slit experiment involves two chiral emitters of opposite handedness at points r1 and r2 separated by a distance d = ∣r1 − r2∣
Since chiral emitters of opposite handedness are characterized by fields of equal amplitude emitted out of phase[4,8], the emitted fields at these two points are: P1 = (A0 + ξAeiφ)e−iωt and P2 = (A0 − ξAeiφ)e−iωt, where A0 is a common non-chiral sensitive component of the emitted field, A is the amplitude of each chiral-sensitive component, φ is the phase delay between the chiral and achiral components, and ξ = ±1 defines the handedness of the slit at position r1
Summary
Structured light, which exhibits nontrivial intensity, phase, and polarization patterns in space, has key applications ranging from imaging and 3D micromanipulation to classical and quantum communication. We structure light’s local handedness in space to introduce and realize an enantio-sensitive interferometer for efficient chiral recognition without magnetic interactions, which can be seen as an enantio-sensitive version of Young’s double slit experiment. Mirror reflection transforms a chiral object into its opposite counterpart, with our left and right hands being a typical example These mirror twins are called enantiomers, and symmetry dictates that they behave identically unless interacting with another chiral object. We describe a new highly enantio-sensitive phenomenon, which relies on structuring light’s handedness in time and space, to effectively control the handedness of local emitters in the chiral medium, complementing the rich family of vectorial light structures[13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. It allows us to realize a chiral version of Young’s double slit experiment, which ‘bends’ the non-linear optical response of a chiral medium in an enantio-sensitive and moleculespecific manner
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