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Updated: Sep 3, 2025

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Optimization of the double-laser-pulse scheme for enantioselective orientation of chiral molecules
Long Xu1, Ilia Tutunnikov1, Yehiam Prior1
1AMOS and Department of Chemical and Biological Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
Abstract:
We present a comprehensive study of enantioselective orientation of chiral molecules excited by a pair of delayed cross-polarized femtosecond laser pulses. We show that by optimizing the pulses' parameters, a significant degree (∼10%) of enantioselective orientation can be achieved at 0 and 5 K rotational temperatures. This study suggests a set of reasonable experimental conditions for inducing and measuring strong enantioselective orientation. The strong enantioselective orientation and the wide availability of the femtosecond laser systems required for the proposed experiments may open new avenues for discriminating and separating molecular enantiomers.
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