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arXiv · 1609.03828

Observation of enhanced chiral asymmetries in the inner-shell photoionization of uniaxially oriented methyloxirane enantiomers

Abstract

Most large molecules are chiral in their structure: they exist as two enantiomers, which are mirror images of each other. Whereas the rovibronic sublevels of two enantiomers are almost identical, it turns out that the photoelectric effect is sensitive to the absolute configuration of the ionized enantiomer - an effect termed Photoelectron Circular Dichroism (PECD). Our comprehensive study demonstrates that the origin of PECD can be found in the molecular frame electron emission pattern connecting PECD to other fundamental photophysical effects as the circular dichroism in angular distributions (CDAD). Accordingly, orienting a chiral molecule in space enhances the PECD by a factor of about 10.

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Maurice Tia, Martin Pitzer, Gregor Kastirke, Janine Gatzke, Hong-Keun Kim, Florian Trinter, Jonas Rist, Alexander Hartung, Daniel Trabert, Juliane Siebert, Kevin Henrichs, Jasper Becht, Stefan Zeller, Helena Gassert, Florian Wiegandt, Robert Wallauer, Andreas Kuhlins, Carl Schober, Tobias Bauer, Natascha Wechselberger, Phillip Burzynski, Jonathan Neff, Miriam Weller, Daniel Metz, Max Kircher, Markus Waitz, Joshua B. Williams, Lothar Schmidt, Anne D. Mueller, Andre Knie, Andreas Hans, Ltaief Ben Ltaief, Arno Ehresmann, Robert Berger, Hironobu Fukuzawa, Kiyoshi Ueda, Horst Schmidt-Boecking, Reinhard Doerner, Till Jahnke, Philipp V. Demekhin, Markus Schoeffler. 2016-09-13. Observation of enhanced chiral asymmetries in the inner-shell photoionization of uniaxially oriented methyloxirane enantiomers. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01000

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