Recovery of High-Energy Photoelectron Circular Dichroism through Fano Interference.

It is commonly accepted that the magnitude of a photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD) is governed by the ability of an outgoing photoelectron wave packet to probe the chiral asymmetry of a molecule. To be able to accumulate this characteristic asymmetry while escaping the chiral ion, photoelectrons need to have relatively small kinetic energies of up to a few tens of electron volts. Here, we demonstrate a substantial PECD for very fast photoelectrons above 500 eV kinetic energy released from methyloxirane by a participator resonant Auger decay of its lowermost O 1s excitation. This effect emerges as a result of the Fano interference between the direct and resonant photoionization pathways, notwithstanding that their individual effects are negligibly small. The resulting dichroic parameter has an anomalous dispersion: It changes its sign across the resonance, which can be considered as an analogue of the Cotton effect in the x-ray regime.