Chirality-Induced Orbital Selectivity through Linear-Orbital Coupling

Abstract: This work investigates electron transport through chiral electrostatic potentials by modeling the system in three spatial dimensions and demonstrates that chirality-induced orbital selectivity (CIOS) produces pronounced enantiospecific transmission, dependent on the electron's initial orbital angular momentum (OAM) state. The results show that transverse electron motion in a chiral environment, captured by OAM dynamics, gives rise to strong orbital selectivity that reverses upon inversion of the handedness of the chiral potential. This behavior originates from a coupling between the electron's linear and orbital angular momenta, leading to effects that are significantly stronger than those arising from spin-phonon and bare spin-orbit interactions under realistic physical conditions. Moreover, the CIOS effect is shown to increase with the length of the chiral region and remains robust against static disorder. The orbital selectivity can give rise to spin selectivity when initial correlations exist between spin and OAM states. These findings underscore the importance of orbital contributions to enantiospecific electron transport in chiral systems and suggest that CIOS plays a critical role alongside existing spin-based mechanisms.