Université de Bordeaux, CNRS, Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine, 351 cours de la libération, F-33400 Talence, France.
Nat Commun. 2014 Apr 10;5:3577. doi: 10.1038/ncomms4577.
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.
缺乏镜像对称和手性在物理、化学和生命科学中起着至关重要的作用。实体的被动分离，这些实体仅在手性上有所不同，而不需要手性材料环境，仍然是一项具有吸引力的科学和工业效益的挑战性任务。迄今为止，仅报道了少数几个实验尝试，并且仍然局限于微米尺度，其中大多数依赖于与微物体的手性形状相关的流体动力来进行分类。在这里，我们通过依赖于自旋的光力学实验证明，在手性光的作用下，材料的手性可以在流体环境中进行被动分离，而无需手性形态的前提条件。这为最先进的光流控工具包带来了新的发展，并且设想了一种新型的被动集成光流控分拣器，能够处理分子尺度的实体。
