Optical Enantioseparation of Racemic Emulsions of Chiral Microparticles

Abstract

The separation of chiral objects with opposite handedness is an important scientific and technological challenge, especially in pharmaceutical research and production. Although established techniques operate at industrial scale, improvements are welcome, especially toward the development of compound-insensitive processes. This study reports experiments to resolve a racemic mixture of chiral particles by purely optical means, which also lead to numerical exploration of the cooperative effects of hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the viscous fluid surrounding the particles, which can speed up the chiral sorting process.