Speaker
Description
Chirality is a fundamental structural feature of many molecules and plays an important role in biological processes as well as in chemical synthesis via lock-and-key-type interactions. Although macroscopic methods exist to determine the enantiomeric excess of chiral molecules in chemical and biological environments, a full microscopic understanding of chirality-specific responses of individual molecules to external triggers, and of how these responses are modified by environmental influences, remains incomplete. Photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD) is a phenomenon driven purely by electric-dipole interactions and is therefore exceptionally sensitive to the chiral arrangement of atoms in a molecule. In contrast to other radiation-induced probes, which often rely on weaker magnetic-dipole or electric-quadrupole contributions, PECD exhibits a characteristic forward–backward asymmetry in the angular distribution of photoelectrons emitted upon ionization with circularly polarized light. This asymmetry reverses sign when either the light helicity or the molecular enantiomer is inverted.
In this work, we present static PECD measurements of gas-phase methyloxirane at the O 1s edge, where we observe a clear mirror-symmetric asymmetry. In addition, we report ion spectra recorded following O 1s ionization using EuXFEL pulses, together with complementary ion spectra measured in our laboratory at 800 nm. These data provide a basis for comparing core-level chiral response under different excitation conditions.
| Scientific Topics | AMO Physics |
|---|