Description of Molecular Chirality and its Analysis via High Harmonic Generation

To clarify the microscopic origin of chirality-induced optical effect, we develop an analytical method that extracts the chiral part of the Hamiltonian of molecular electronic states. We demonstrate this method in a model chiral molecule consisting of helically stacked two N regular polygons, and compare it with numerical calculation for chiral discrimination via high-harmonic generation (HHG) of the same molecule. The discrimination signal here is the difference between the harmonic intensity from the bicircular laser field and that from its reflected laser field, resulting in a pseudoscalar quantity that reflects the chirality of the molecule. As a result, we find that, to obtain the large discrimination signal via HHG difference, the increase of capacity to generate the polar quantity is more advantageous than maximizing the conversion efficiency via the optimization of molecular chirality. We speculate this criteria may be extended to other optical and current-induced processes relevant to the chiral molecules and materials.