Optimal Selective Orientation of Chiral Molecules Using Femtosecond Laser Pulses

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 (~ 10%) degree of enantioselective orientation can be achieved at zero and at five kelvin 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.