Related papers: Climbing the rotational ladder to chirality
Optical beams with a new and distinctive type of helicity have become the subject of much recent interest. While circularly polarised light comprises photons with spin angular momentum, these optically engineered 'twisted beams' (optical…
Trains of ultrashort laser pulses separated by the time of rotational revival (typically, tens of picoseconds) have been exploited for creating ensembles of aligned molecules. In this work we introduce a chiral pulse train - a sequence of…
Chiral systems exhibit unique properties traditionally linked to their asymmetric spatial arrangement. Recently, multiple laser pulses were shown to induce purely electronic chiral states without altering the nuclear configuration. Here, we…
Molecular chirality is inherent to biology and cellular chemistry. In this report, the origin of enantiomeric selectivity is analyzed from the viewpoint of the "RNA World" model, based on the autocatalytic self-replication of glyceraldehyde…
The chiral structure of liquid crystalline phases arises due to the intrinsic chirality of the constituent mesogens. While it is seemingly straightforward to quantify the macroscopic chirality by using, for instance, the cholesteric pitch…
A great endeavor has been undertaken to engineer molecular rotors operated by an electrical current. A frequently met operation principle is the transfer of angular momentum taken from the incident flux. In this paper we present an…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
We demonstrate experimentally a method of varying the degree of directionality in laser-induced molecular rotation. To control the ratio between the number of clockwise and counter-clockwise rotating molecules (with respect to a fixed…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are formed by achiral molecules with large dipole moments. Its three-dimensional orientational order is universally described as unidirectionally polar. We demonstrate that the ground state of…
We investigate the phenomenon of producing vibration-induced rotational motion in a cylinder filled with achiral rods and being vibrated by an external drive. The arrangement of the rods develops chirality as a result of the interaction of…
Chiral molecules have attracted significant multidisciplinary interest and extensive research owing to their remarkable ability to achieve charge-to-spin conversion, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS). A recent experiment…
As much as chiral metasurfaces are significant in stereochemistry and polarization control, tunable chiroptical response is important for their dynamic counterparts. A single metasurface device with invertible chiral states can selectively…
Polar active particles constitute a wide class of synthetic colloids that are able to propel along a preferential direction, given by their polar axis. Here, we demonstrate a generic self-phoretic mechanism that leads to their spontaneous…
Separation of the two mirror images of a chiral molecule, the enantiomers, is a historically complicated problem of major relevance for biological systems. Since chiral molecules are optically active, it has been speculated that strong…
Chirality is breaking of mirror symmetry in matter. In the fields of biology and chemistry, this is particularly important because some of the essential molecules in life such as amino acids and DNA have chirality. It is a long-standing…
The fundamental issues of symmetry related to chirality are discussed and applied to simple situations relevant to liquid crystals. We show that any chiral measure of a geometric object is a pseudoscalar (invariant under proper rotations…
Controlling optical chirality at the subwavelength scales is essential for many applications of nanophotonic structures in polarization optics, sensing, and nonlinear photonics. Achieving a strong chiroptical response in planar dielectric…
Chiral magnetism is a fascinating quantum phenomena that has been found in low-dimensional magnetic materials. It is not only interesting for understanding the concept of chirality, but also important for potential applications in…
Distinguishing between the left- and right-handed versions of a chiral molecule (enantiomers) is vital, but also inherently difficult. Traditional optical methods using elliptically or circularly polarized light rely on weak linear effects…
It has been long recognized that the spatial polarization of the electronic clouds in molecules, and the spatial arrangements of atoms into chiral molecular structures, play crucial roles in physics, chemistry and biology. However, these…