Chiral topological light for detection of robust enantiosensitive observables

Abstract

The topological response of matter to electromagnetic fields is a highly demanded property in materials design and metrology due to its robustness against noise and decoherence, stimulating recent advances in ultrafast photonics. Embedding topological properties into the enantiosensitive optical response of chiral molecules could therefore enhance the efficiency and robustness of chiral optical discrimination. Here we achieve such a topological embedding by introducing the concept of chiral topological light—a light beam which displays chirality locally, with an azimuthal distribution of its handedness described globally by a topological charge. The topological charge is mapped onto the azimuthal intensity modulation of the non-linear optical response, where enantiosensitivity is encoded into its spatial rotation. The spatial rotation is robust against intensity fluctuations and imperfect local polarization states of the driving field. Our theoretical results show that chiral topological light enables detection of percentage-level enantiomeric excesses in randomly oriented mixtures of chiral molecules, opening a way to new, extremely sensitive and robust chiro-optical spectroscopies with attosecond time resolution. The concept of chiral topological light—a polychromatic light with chiral closed 3D polarization trajectories, space-varying with the azimuthal angle—is introduced and used for efficient sensing in chiral molecules, showcasing an example of successful application of topological concepts in optics.