English

Direct observation of time-dependent coherent chiral tunneling dynamics

Quantum Physics 2025-04-01 v2 Atomic Physics

Abstract

Superpositions of handed molecular states give rise to achiral eigenstates, delocalized across a double-well potential via tunneling. A coherent superposition of these energy eigenstates could dynamically relocalize the molecules into chiral states, which has only been addressed theoretically. Here, we present a microwave six-wave mixing pump-probe study to create and probe coherent chiral tunneling dynamics in a rotational state. Through a time-resolved scheme, we uncover the periodic time evolution of the induced chiral wavepacket under field-free conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate precise phase control of this coherence via phase modulation during pump excitation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.06682,
  title  = {Direct observation of time-dependent coherent chiral tunneling dynamics},
  author = {Wenhao Sun and Denis S. Tikhonov and Melanie Schnell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.06682},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures in the main text and 27 pages, 12 figures, and 4 tables in the Supplementary Material