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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Interplay between the electric-dipole and nondipole-induced forward-backward asymmetries in the inner-shell photoionization of chiral molecules

Nikolay M. Novikovskiy1, Dmitrii V. Rezvan1, Laura Sommerlad2, Arno Ehresmann1, Till Jahnke3,4, Reinhard Dörner2, Markus S. Schöffler2, and Philipp V. Demekhin1,*

  • *Contact author: demekhin@physik.uni-kassel.de
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Phys. Rev. A 112, L061102 – Published 10 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/x18h-rn31

Abstract

We investigate the laboratory-frame angular emission distribution of photoelectrons, ejected by circularly polarized light from chiral molecules, theoretically beyond the electric-dipole approximation. We demonstrate that the helicity-dependent forward-backward asymmetry, which is governed by the electric-dipole interaction and known as photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD), can be altered significantly by the helicity-independent asymmetry, which is induced by nondipole contributions. Our findings are exemplified by numerical calculations on the inner-shell photoionization of the bromine atom in the epibromohydrin molecule. The uncovered effect is expected to be omnipresent in the deep inner-shell ionization and needs to be taken into consideration in the interpretation of experiments on PECD in chiral molecules.

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Phys. Rev. A 112, L061102– Published 10 December, 2025
  • Received 25 August 2025
  • Accepted 18 November 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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