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Updated: Jun 21, 2025

Coulomb Explosion Imaging as a Tool to Distinguish Between Stereoisomers
Published on: August 18, 2017
Structured electrons with chiral mass and charge
Yiqi Fang1, Joel Kuttruff1, David Nabben1
1Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Physik, 78464 Konstanz, Germany.
Abstract:
Chirality is a phenomenon with widespread relevance in fundamental physics, material science, chemistry, optics, and spectroscopy. In this work, we show that a free electron can be converted by the field cycles of laser light into a right-handed or left-handed coil of mass and charge. In contrast to phase-vortex beams, our electrons maintained a flat de Broglie wave but obtained their chirality from the shape of their expectation value in space and time. Measurements of wave function densities by attosecond gating revealed the three-dimensional shape of coils and double coils with left-handed or right-handed pitch. Engineered elementary particles with such or related chiral geometries should be useful for applications in chiral sensing, free-electron quantum optics, particle physics or electron microscopy.
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