Phys.org December 23, 2022 Tunnel ionization is of paramount importance in strong-field physics and attoscience. However, the tunneling dynamics and properties of the outgoing electronic wave packets often remain hidden beneath the influence of the subsequent scattering of the released electron onto the ionic potential. An international team of researchers (France, Israel) has characterized the influence of sub-barrier dynamics on the amplitude and phase of the wave packets emerging from the tunnel using chiral molecules, whose photoionization by circularly polarized light produces forward-backward asymmetric electron distributions with respect to the light propagation direction. The asymmetric patterns provided a background-free signature […]
Tag Archives: Chirality
Using light to put a twist on electrons
Science Daily February 26, 2020 Chirality occurs not in the structure of the molecules themselves, but in a kind of patterning in the density of electrons within the material. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Northeastern University, Cornell University, Drexel University, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) found that while titanium diselenide at room temperature has no chirality to it, as its temperature decreases it reaches a critical point where the balance of right-handed and left-handed electronic configurations gets thrown off and one type begins to dominate. They found that this effect could be controlled and enhanced by shining […]