Related papers: Ultrafast optical rotation for extremely sensitive…
Molecular chirality is an omnipresent phenomenon of fundamental significance in physics, chemistry and biology. For this reason, search for novel techniques for enantioselective control, detection and separation of chiral molecules is of…
The ultimate control of magnetic states of matter at femtosecond (or even faster) timescales defines one of the most pursued paradigm shifts for future information technology. In this context, ultrafast laser pulses developed into extremely…
Chiroptical techniques for detecting and characterizing the chirality of matter and artificial nanostructures are traditionally based on their interaction with chiral light, typically circularly-polarized fields propagating in free space.…
Chiral materials display a property called optical activity, which is the capability to interact differentially with left and right circularly polarised light. This leads to the ability to manipulate the polarisation state of light, which…
Photons are nonchiral particles: their handedness can be both left and right. However, when light is transversely confined, it can locally exhibit a transverse spin whose orientation is fixed by the propagation direction of the photons.…
Optical metasurfaces are rapidly establishing as key-enabling platforms for nanophotonics applications. Along with the ability of taming light in subwavelength thicknesses, they can feature multiple functionalities in one device. The…
Detecting and controlling the chirality of materials play an essential role in exploring nature, providing new avenues for material creation, discrimination, and manipulation. In such tasks, chiral reagents are essential in defining or…
We report on the first experimental demonstration of enantioselective rotational control of chiral molecules with a laser field. In our experiments, two enantiomers of propylene oxide are brought to accelerated unidirectional rotation by…
Spin-orbit interaction (SOI) have provided a new viable roadmap for the development of spin-based photonics devices. However, existing strategies to control the SOI focus commonly on tailoring the spatial dimension of light fields yet…
Strong light-matter coupling in chiral cavities has been proposed as an effective way to selectively interact with an enantiomer that shares the same handedness as the cavity's chiral mode. We show that surface plasmons supported by a…
Enantioselective orientation of chiral molecules excited by a shaped picosecond laser pulse and a delayed femtosecond pulse is considered. Using quantum mechanical simulations, we demonstrate a strong field-free enantioselective orientation…
We study theoretically interaction of a bilayer graphene with a circularly polarized ultrafast optical pulse of a single oscillation at an oblique incidence. The normal component of the pulse breaks the inversion symmetry of the system and…
Chiral discrimination, a problem of vital importance, has recently become an emerging frontier in ultrafast physics, with remarkable progress achieved in multiphoton and strong-field regimes. Rydberg excitations, unavoidable in the…
Ultrafast imaging of molecular chirality is a key step towards the dream of imaging and interpreting electronic dynamics in complex and biologically relevant molecules. Here, we propose a new ultrafast chiral phenomenon exploiting recent…
We outline the design and characterization of a laser pulse shaper, which creates an ``ultraslow optical centrifuge'' - a linearly polarized field whose polarization vector rotates with arbitrarily low angular acceleration. By directly…
Chiral nonlinear response has been explored for decades due to its extreme sensitivity to molecular and structural dissymmetry. Conventional approaches often require bulky systems and produce only static nonlinear chirality. Here, we report…
The coupling of laser light to matter can exert sub-cycle coherent control over material properties, with optically induced currents and magnetism shown to be controllable on ultrafast femtosecond time scales. Here, by employing laser light…
Inspired by a sea creature, we identify a robust chiral optical force that pushes the opposite enantiomers of a chiral molecule towards regions of orthogonal linear polarization in an optical field via electric dipole interactions. Our…
Planar chiral structures possess a two dimensional handedness that is associated with broken mirror symmetry. Such motifs span vast length scales; examples include certain pinwheel molecules, nautilus shells, cyclone wind patterns and…
Polarizing microscopy brought about many advancements in the science of liquid crystals and other soft materials, including those of biological origin. Recent developments in optics and computer-based analysis enabled a new generation of…