Mikheev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect in chiral molecules

Abstract

In a recent article (Phys Rev A 2009, 80, 012110), we have proposed an alternative method to measure the parity-violating energy difference between enantiomers of chiral molecules by modifying the dynamics of the two-state system using an external chiral field, in particular circularly polarized light. When this field is properly tuned, the two-state system becomes resonant, thus being maximal the probability of interconversion between enantiomers. In this work, we show that the resonance found in our previous work is identical to that found in two-flavor neutrino oscillations, known as Mikheev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) resonance. We use some analogies between neutrinos and chiral molecules to derive some interesting properties of the oscillations between enantiomers. In particular, we obtain an expression for the transition probability between them when their energy difference is time-dependent. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.