Charge and Spin Dynamics and Enantioselectivity in Chiral Molecules

J. Fransson

Published 2021-10-26, updated 2022-01-17Version 2

Charge and spin dynamics is addressed in chiral molecules immediately after the instantaneous coupling to an external metallic reservoir. It is shown how a spin-polarization is induced in the chiral structure as a response to the charge dynamics. The dynamics indicate that chiral induced spin selectivity is an excited states phenomenon which, in the transient regime partly can be captured using a simplistic single particle description, however, in the stationary limit definitively shows that electron correlations, e.g., electron-vibration interactions, crucially contribute to sustain an intrinsic spin anisotropy that can lead to a non-vanishing spin selectivity. The dynamics, moreover, provide insight to enantiomer separation, due to different acquired spin-polarizations.