About our research

Chirality is a key concept in many fields such as chemistry and physics. Reactions involving chiral molecules often entail changes in molecular chirality. One way to visualize photo-induced chiral dynamics during chemical transformations in real time is time-resolved photoelectron circular dichroism (TRPECD; for more information, see Svoboda et al. 2022, Science Advances). The PECD manifests itself as an asymmetry in a photoelectron angular distribution (PAD) when an ensemble of randomly oriented chiral molecules is ionized with circularly polarized (CP) radiation. The PAD is measured by time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy combined with extreme ultraviolet CP femtosecond pulses obtained through high harmonic generation.

We aim to study chiral dynamics on femtosecond timescales, thereby advancing several research disciplines such as excited-state photochemistry and femtochirality. These are our major goals:

• probing electron correlations during double ionization of chiral molecules,
• probing chiral changes during the photo-switching of helicenes,
• and the development of a theoretical framework for calculating the TRPECD.