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Geometrical chirality is a universal phenomenon that surrounds us on many different length scales ranging from geometrical shapes of various living organisms to DNA and drug molecules. The majority of molecules involved in biological processes are chiral. Acting on a biological receptor, opposite enantiomers of the same molecule cause different response, perceived as different odor or taste. In pharmaceutics, the opposite enantiomer of a drug molecule can be useless at best, but often it is toxic for the chiral human body. In this regard, there is a great demand from the pharmaceutical industry to develop effective methods of separating chiral enantiomers.
Interaction of chiral matter with circularly polarized electromagnetic fields leads to the effect of circular dichroism, which underlies numerous methods for distinguishing molecular enantiomers. However, those interactions are usually weak and can be well understood without the need to consider a correlated motion between light and matter. If and how strong light-matter interaction can aid those challenging tasks remained largely unclear thus far.
In this talk, I will overview the fundamentals of chirality of light and matter, present optical designs required for realization of chiral polaritonic states, discuss recently developed theoretical models, and speculate on the exciting phenomena that can be enabled by strong coupling between chiral light and matter. Recent theoretical efforts already indicate that chiral polaritonic systems may feature non-trivial optical phenomena, where the interplay of light and matter chirality plays the key role in determining the eigenstates of the system, as well as its response to external electromagnetic fields. Chiral polaritons – strongly coupled quasiparticles combining chiral excitations of light and matter – could become a new physical platform offering us more control over chirality of matter.
Denis Baranov received his Ph.D. degree in physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2016. After completing his Ph.D. he took a position of postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, and now he is a leading researcher in the Center for Photonics & 2D Materials at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. His research focuses on counter-intuitive and extraordinary effects of interaction between light and matter. Those include the general aspects of scattering theory by resonant systems, processes of perfect electromagnetic absorption and lasing, behavior of coupled quantum emitter-cavity systems, and the properties of the vacuum state of optical structures.