Abstract | The year 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the first experimental verification of a novel chiroptical phenomenon in the angular scattering of electrons upon photoionization of a chiral molecule by VUV circularly polarized synchrotron radiation. This experimental proof appeared 25 years after the first phenomenological prediction by Ritchie and Cherepkov but just one year after Ivan Powis published his first two seminal theoretical papers on this novel phenomenon. This experiment confirmed the predictions of detailed scattering calculations that the electron asymmetry, later called PhotoElectron Circular Dichroism (PECD), was large and, as shown in subsequent experiments, could reach up to several tens of percent of the total cross section, indicating that it is exquisitely suited to the study of dilute chiral matter. |
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