FINALIST: Novel Chirality and Symmetry Properties of Light and their Utilization for Ultrafast Spectroscopy

In recent years high harmonic generation (HHG) has prevailed as a highly effective approach for ultrafast spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, allowing sub-femtosecond resolution for a variety of chemical and physical properties. However, due to the process inherent extreme nonlinearity, a unified approach for extracting physical information from measured spectra is missing. The difficulty in connecting between the system’s degrees of freedom of interest and measurements is especially limiting in complex chemical systems such as chiral molecules. In my talk, I will discuss our recent progress in this direction. I will present a closed-form symmetry theory for light-matter interactions, which when applied to HHG, gives rise to several novel applications: (i) its consistent and unified utilization for ultrafast symmetry breaking spectroscopy techniques (e.g. for molecular ring currents); (ii) The derivation of new chirality density terms in electromagnetic theory that are analogous to molecular-chirality – these allow background free determination of enantiomeric-excess in all-optical measurements through intense electric-dipole transitions; (iii) Tailored control of the temporal, spectral, and polarization, properties of XUV light.

¹Thesis advisor: Oren Cohen, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology