Design of an optical conveyor for selective separation of a mixture of enantiomers

P. Acebal, L. Carretero, and S. Blaya

Chiral resolution is a fundamental problem in pharmaceutics or agrochemicals, so a great effort has been made to generate experimental techniques capable of producing mechanical separation of a mixture of enantiomers. Unlike other techniques that are usually employed, such as chiral resolving agents or chiral chromatography, we propose a new technique which is directly applicable in solution and without further processing. This technique is based on optical forces, since we show that with the proper design of the polarization states of the incident beams and temporal dephasing, a chiral sensitive optical conveyor can be obtained that is able to transport enantiomers in opposite directions. The implementation of such an optical conveyor with the required focused optical fields produces a well-defined trapping region for each enantiomer, since theoretical simulations over a large number of chiral particle trajectories show that it is possible to reach values of enantiomeric excess of over 99%.

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