Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Twisty light tells left-handed molecules from right - New Scientist - New Scientist

Twisty light tells left-handed molecules from right: Now Yiqiao Tang and Adam Cohen of Harvard University have created "superchiral" light that twists very tightly in places. To make it, they shone a right-handed green laser beam at a mirror and let it interact with the left-handed reflection...
A left-handed superchiral beam shining on left-handed molecules caused the molecules to blaze. But those same molecules hardly blushed when they were hit by a right-handed beam, showing that the superchiral light was indeed interacting with the chirality of the molecules.

No comments:

Post a Comment