Direct observation of time-dependent coherent chiral tunneling dynamics
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