Synthesis of multiple longitudinal polarization vortex structures and its application in sorting chiral nanoparticles.

Abstract

As the essential properties of organisms, detection and characterization of chirality are of supreme importance in physiology and pharmacology. In this work, we propose an optical technique to sort chiral materials by use of longitudinal polarization vortex (LPV) structures, which is generated with tightly focusing Pancharatnam-Berry tailored Laguerre-Gaussian beam. The nonparaxial propagation of the focusing field leads to the creation of multiple pairs of dual LPV structures with arbitrary topological charge and location, which can be independently controlled by the spatial phase modulation applied on the illumination. More importantly, the opposite spin angular momentums carried by each pair of dual foci lead to different energy flow directions, making it suitable to sort nanoparticles by their handedness. In addition, the LPV structures would also bring different dynamic behaviors to the enantiomers, providing a feasible route toward all-optical enantiopure chemical syntheses and enantiomer separations in pharmaceuticals.