AMPLEPHY - All-optical multi-photon highly enantioselective photochemistry

Molecular chirality plays an important role in chemical reactivity, has direct implications throughout the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, and is rapidly becoming an important asset for nanotechnology.

But our ability to trigger different chemical reactions in the left and right enantiomers of a chiral molecule using light is extremely limited.

The goal of this proposal is to leverage modern light sources to achieve potentially disruptive breakthroughs as well as to improve our fundamental understanding of highly enantioselective photochemistry.

Multiphoton coherent control promises a plausible route towards this goal and pioneering experiments using microwaves to drive rotational transitions have taken important steps in this direction.

But rotational excitations do not lead to the nuclear rearrangement required for photochemistry and the method cannot be scaled to liquid samples, where applications are most relevant.

Thus, photochemistry requires replacing rotational transitions by electronic transitions, which in turn requries bridging a monumental gap in terms of energy scales and complexity, going from ~0.0001 eV to ~10 eV and from rigid rotors to complex multielectron polyatomic systems.

Recent results show that this transition is far from trivial and taking into account variations of the field as a function of position is crucial.

The first general objective of this proposal is to provide a theoretical demonstration of all- optical highly enantioselective photochemistry using realistic fields.

The second general objective of this proposal is to explore the possibilities offered by approaching enantioselective photochemistry from the time-domain perspective (enantioselective charge migration) taking advantage of intense and ultrashort X-ray sources (XFELs).