Abstract

Ever since the discovery of handedness in optical activity in 1848 [1], chirality has been recognized as an important property of most biological molecules and some special crystals. The most common method for obtaining circular dichroism property from an achiral surface is by adsorbing chiral organic ligands on the surface with the adsorbed ligands retaining their chirality. Materials with symmetric bulk structures, such as gas and metals, are usually achiral or circular non-dichroic. While circular dichroism has been found in studies of double photoionization of symmetric helium atom [2] and angular distribution of photoemission on an achiral Si surface [3], those studies are extremely technically involving because the contributing processes only exhibit at a microscopic quantum level.

© 2007 IEEE