Tunable Sorting of Mesoscopic Chiral Structures by External Noise in Achiral Periodic Potentials

Abstract

Efficient chirality sorting is now highly demanded to separate assembled mesoscopic chiral structures which are of very special physical properties rather than their achiral counterparts or those at the single-particle level. However, the efficiency of conventional methods usually suffers from the thermal or external noise. Here, we propose a mechanism utilizing external noise to attain a tunable sorting of mesoscopic chiral particles in an achiral periodic potential. The complete chirality-separation stems from the path selection by a noise-induced biased flux in a nonequilibrium landscape. Such mechanism provides a practicable way to control the motion of chiral particles by simply adjusting the noise intensity, which is demonstrated by simultaneous separation of several kinds of enantiomorphs with different degrees of chirality. The robustness and generalizability of noise-tuned chirality sorting is further verified in systems with other types of periodic potentials or spatially/temporally correlated noise.