Related papers: Enantioselection and chiral sorting of single micr…
Spin polarization in chiral molecules is a magnetic molecular response associated with electron transport and enantioselective bond polarization that occurs even in the absence of an external magnetic field. An unexpected finding by Santos…
Biomolecules that constitute life on Earth are chiral, but the precise mechanism by which homochirality emerged remains a mystery. In this work it is demonstrated that reactions of radical pairs, where one of the radical electron spins is…
Chiral crystals exhibit useful handedness-dependent properties, including spin selectivity and circularly polarized light sensitivity, yet controlling which enantiomer forms during synthesis remains a central challenge. Existing approaches…
Evanescent electromagnetic waves possess spin-momentum locking, where the direction of propagation (momentum) is locked to the inherent polarization of the wave (transverse spin). We study the optical forces arising from this universal…
We propose an approach to sensitively probe the chirality of molecules by measuring their coherent optical absorption spectra. It is shown that quantum dynamics of the cyclic three-level chiral molecules driven by appropriately-designed…
Optical approaches for wavefront shaping traditionally rely on phase modulation through holographic techniques. Shaping the phase determines a wave's diffraction and hence its intensity distribution in space. We instead show that shaping…
The optical trapping and manipulation of small particles is an important tool for probing fluid properties at the microscale. In particular, microrheology exploits the manipulation and rotation of micron-scale particles to probe local…
Three-wave mixing spectroscopy of chiral molecules, which exist in left-handed and right-handed conformations, allows for enantio-selective population transfer despite random orientation of the molecules. This is based on constructive…
Controlling the polarization state of light with sub-picosecond speed and subwavelength precision remains a key challenge for next-generation nanophotonic devices. Conventional methods such as birefringent crystals, liquid crystals, or…
We develop a family of chiral measures to quantify the chirality of a distribution and assign it a handedness. Our measures are built using the tensorial moments of the distribution, which naturally encode its spatial character, not only…
Recent progress has boosted the resolving power of optical microscopies to spatial dimensions well below the diffraction limit. Yet, axial super-resolution and axial single-molecule localisation typically require more complicated…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…
Multifocus microscopy enables recording of entire volumes in a single camera exposure. In dense samples, multifocus microscopy is severely hampered by background haze. Here, we introduce a scalable multifocus method that incorporates…
The infamous weakness of molecular chiroptical responses challenges the all-optical realization of crucial applications such as enantio-selective sorting of chiral molecules, or biasing chiral chemical reactions. Chiral optical cavities are…
Light can exert radiation pressure on any object it encounters and that resulting optical force can be used to manipulate particles. It is commonly assumed that light should move a particle forward and indeed an incident plane wave with a…
Photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD) is a method whereby randomly oriented chiral molecules are irradiated by circularly-polarized light, photoionizing electrons, which are measured in a momentum-resolved manner. This scheme permits…
High-contrast imaging from space must overcome two major noise sources to successfully detect a terrestrial planet angularly close to its parent star: photon noise from diffracted star light, and speckle noise from star light scattered by…
The occurrence of biological homochirality is attributed to symmetry breaking mechanisms which are still debatable1. Studies of symmetry breaking require tools for monitoring the population ratios of individual chiral nano-objects, such as…
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.…
We investigate the polarization dependence of optical nonlinearity enhancement for a uniaxial anisotropic composite of metal nanocrystals in a dielectric host. Three cases are distinguished depending on whether the polarization is parallel,…