Mechanical separation of chiral dipoles by chiral light

By Antoine Canaguier-Durand, J. Hutchison, C. Genet, T. Ebbesen. 2013

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We calculate optical forces and torques exerted on a chiral dipole by chiral light fields and reveal genuine chiral forces in combining the chiral contents of both light field and dipolar matter. Here, the optical chirality is characterized in a general way through the definition of optical chirality density and chirality flow. We show, in particular, that both terms have mechanical effects associated, respectively, with reactive and dissipative components of the chiral forces. Remarkably, these chiral force components are directly related to standard observables: optical rotation for the reactive component and circular dichroism for the dissipative one. As a consequence, the resulting forces and torques are dependent on the enantiomeric form of the chiral dipole. This suggests promising strategies for using chiral light forces to mechanically separate chiral objects according to their enantiomeric form.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e247029b8a4229639ad1aceee1483d03d6768e1

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Transverse and longitudinal angular momenta of light (2015, background): “The chirality of the particle or a molecule mixes the electric and magnetic interactions, so that the chiral contributions to the induced electric and magnetic dipole moments can be written as [85,86,89,103]”
Optical tweezers and their applications (2018, background): “dependent optical forces on small particles aiming at all-optical separation of enantiomers [163, 164, 165].”
Extraordinary momentum and spin in evanescent waves (2013, background): “Importantly, it is the canonical momentum p rather than the Poynting vector p that represents the physically-meaningful momentum density of light that appears in experiments ( p = p only in linearly-polarized paraxial fields and plane waves) [19,33].”