Enantioselective optical trapping of single chiral molecules in the superchiral field vicinity of metal nanostructures

Abstract

In this study, we theoretically analyzed the optical force acting on single chiral molecules in the plasmon field induced by metallic nanostructures. Using the extended discrete dipole approximation, we quantitatively examined the optical response of single chiral molecules in the localized plasmon by numerically analyzing the internal polarization structure of the molecules obtained from quantum chemical calculations, without phenomenological treatment. We evaluated the chiral gradient force due to the optical chirality gradient of the superchiral field near the metallic nanostructures for chiral molecules. Our calculation method can be used to evaluate the molecular-orientation dependence and rotational torque by considering the chiral spatial structure inside the molecules. We theoretically showed that the superchiral field induced by chiral plasmonic nanostructures can be used to selectively optically capture the enantiomers of a single chiral molecule.