Abstract
Molecular matter-wave interferometry enables novel strategies for manipulating the internal mechanical motion of complex molecules. Here, we show how chiral molecules can be prepared in a quantum superposition of two enantiomers by far-field matter-wave diffraction and how the resulting tunneling dynamics can be observed. We determine the impact of rovibrational phase averaging and propose a setup for sensing enantiomer-dependent forces, parity-violating weak interactions, and environment-induced superselection of handedness, as suggested to resolve Hund’s paradox. Using ab initio tunneling calculations, we identify [4]-helicene derivatives as promising candidates to implement the proposal with state-of-the-art techniques. This work opens the door for quantum sensing with chiral molecules.Received 20 January 2021Revised 4 June 2021Accepted 14 July 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031056Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasChiralityCold atoms & matter wavesQuantum opticsQuantum sensingPhysical SystemsAtomic & molecular beamsMoleculesTechniquesAb initio calculationsDensity functional theoryInterferometryQuantum chemistry methodsQuantum master equationAtomic, Molecular & OpticalQuantum InformationCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics
Highlights
Controlling the quantum dynamics of molecules enables exploiting their mechanical degrees of freedom for metrology [1,2,3], for quantum information processing [4,5,6,7,8], and for testing the quantum superposition principle [9]
We show how chiral molecules can be prepared in a quantum superposition of two enantiomers by far-field matter-wave diffraction and how the resulting tunneling dynamics can be observed
Assuming ωPV=2π 1⁄4 10 Hz and Ωη=2π ≃ 100 Hz, the means of P0L=RðtÞ are separated by ≃1%, as shown in Fig. 3(b), which can be resolved with state-of-the-art photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD) measurements [47]
Summary
Controlling the quantum dynamics of molecules enables exploiting their mechanical degrees of freedom for metrology [1,2,3], for quantum information processing [4,5,6,7,8], and for testing the quantum superposition principle [9]. Preparing a molecular beam in a quantum superposition of enantiomers and observing their coherent tunneling dynamics will open the door for interferometric measurements of handednessdependent interactions, for enantiomeric state manipulation schemes [27], for detecting the energy splittings due to parity-violating weak interactions [28,29,30,31,32], and for observing the environment-induced decay of tunneling, as proposed to resolve Hund’s paradox [26,33,34,35]. Matter-wave interference is a versatile tool for testing the quantum superposition principle with large molecules [22,36] and for measuring molecular properties in the gas phase [37,38,39]. Molecules, complementing conventional spectroscopic techniques [3,23,43]
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