Optofluidic sorting of material chirality by chiral light

Georgiy Tkachenko (1) , Etienne Brasselet (1)

1 LOMA - Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine

The lack of mirror symmetry, chirality, plays a fundamental role in physics, chemistry and life sciences. The passive separation of entities that only differ by their handedness without need of a chiral material environment remains a challenging task with attractive scientific and industrial benefits. To date, only a few experimental attempts have been reported and remained limited down to the micron scale, most of them relying on hydrodynamical forces associated with the chiral shape of the micro-objects to be sorted. Here we experimentally demonstrate that material chirality can be passively sorted in a fluidic environment by chiral light owing to spin-dependent optical forces without chiral morphology prerequisite. This brings a new twist to the state-of-the-art optofluidic toolbox and the development of a novel kind of passive integrated optofluidic sorters able to deal with molecular scale entities is envisioned.

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Georgiy Tkachenko, Etienne Brasselet. Optofluidic sorting of material chirality by chiral light. Nature Communications, 2014, 5, pp.3577 (1-7). ⟨10.1038/ncomms4577⟩. ⟨hal-00978361⟩