Superchiral electric fields, beer, and coffee

Some new techniques and ideas are so interesting and potentially important that their inventors don’t wait to prove they’re useful before writing a paper. Instead, after describing the ground-breaking work, the inventors outline possible applications that they and others might one day realize.

The delay between invention and application can be brief. In April 2003 I wrote a news story about the creation of precisely timed bursts of extreme UV light that last a few hundred attoseconds (10⁻¹⁸ s). Within a year, one of the inventors, Ferenc Krausz, had used the technique to probe the motion of electrons inside neon atoms on timescales shorter than the time it takes the electrons to orbit the atoms.

Krausz was applying his own technique. This morning I encountered a freshly published paper in Nature Nanotechnology, which, if taken at face value, suggests that its authors, Glasgow University’s Malcolm Kadodwala and his collaborators, implemented someone else’s idea within six months.

The idea was published in the 23 April issue of Physical Review Letters. Harvard University’s Yiqiao Tang and Adam Cohen used James Clerk Maxwell’s famous equations to identify electromagnetic waveforms whose degree of chirality, or handedness, is stronger than that of left- or right-handed circularly polarized light. Such light, Tang and Cohen proposed, could serve as a sensitive probe of amyloid fibrils, viruses, and other biomolecular aggregates whose constituents are themselves chiral.

Although I can’t be sure, I’m guessing that Kadodwala or one of his colleagues read Tang and Cohen’s paper and sprang into action. In the introduction of the Nature Nanotechnology paper, Kadodwala writes:

Kadodwala and his coauthors go on to describe fabricating a PCM, whose periodic features are electrically conducting and of the same few-hundred-nanometer scale as UV and visible wavelengths.

Illuminating the PCM excites plasmons, thereby generating short-range superchiral light. When Kadodwala’s team immersed the PCM in a solution of chiral molecules, they detected strong, telltale resonances whenever the chirality of the PCM matched that of the molecules—just as Tang and Cohen had predicted.

It’s possible that Kadodwala really did find out about Tang and Cohen’s idea by reading their paper. One of the marvels of modern science is how conveniently papers are disseminated.

On the other hand, it’s just as conceivable—and perhaps more comforting—that members of the two teams met one day at a conference and decided over beer, coffee, or other social lubricant to work together.