Charge and Spin Dynamics and Enantioselectivity in Chiral Molecules

Charge and spin dynamics are addressed in chiral molecules immediately after their instantaneous coupling to an external metallic reservoir. This work describes how a spin polarization is induced in the chiral structure as a response to the charge dynamics. The dynamics indicate that chiral induced spin selectivity is an excited state phenomenon that in the transient regime can be partly captured using a simplistic single-particle description but in the stationary limit definitively shows that electron correlations, e.g., electron-vibration interactions, crucially contribute to sustain an intrinsic spin anisotropy that can lead to a nonvanishing spin selectivity. The dynamics, moreover, provide insight into enantiomer separation, due to different acquired spin polarizations.