Fig. 2: Chirality polarized, but racemic, light.

a Two non-collinear beams carry an ω field, linearly polarized in the xy propagation plane, and an orthogonally polarized 2ω field, with the same two-color delay in both beams. b Normalized 2ω-field amplitude (F_2ω, blue line) and transverse spin (S_2ω ∝ F_xF_y, red line). c Local handedness of the light field, characterized by its fifth-order chiral correlation function h⁽⁵⁾. The colors encode the phase of h⁽⁵⁾ and thus the field’s handedness, which is controlled by the relative phase ϕ (see Eq. (4) and Methods); purple: \(\arg \{{h}^{(5)}\}=2\phi +0.5\pi\), green: \(\arg \{{h}^{(5)}\}=2\phi -0.5\pi\). Since the chirality integrated over x is equal to zero, the light is racemic. The gray arrows indicate the direction of polarization of chirality. We have used the following laser parameters: ω = 0.044a.u. (λ = 1030nm), \({F}_{\omega }^{(1)}={F}_{\omega }^{(2)}=0.0146\)a.u., \({F}_{2\omega }^{(1)}/{F}_{\omega }^{(1)}={F}_{2\omega }^{(2)}/{F}_{\omega }^{(2)}=\sin (\alpha )\); 2α = 10^∘ is the angle between the beams, the focal diameter is 200 μm, and \({\phi }_{\omega ,2\omega }^{(1)}={\phi }_{\omega ,2\omega }^{(2)}\).