Enantiosensitivity of spin polarization in molecular photoionization

Angular distributions of photoelectrons with a defined spin orientation, released by the absorption of a single circularly polarized photon from randomly oriented chiral molecules, are derived and analyzed within the electric-dipole approximation. The revealed symmetry properties of the distributions support previous findings that the total spin polarization of photoelectrons is independent of the enantiomer of a chiral molecule, whereas the angular distribution of the spin polarization is enantiosensitive. Numerical applications to the achiral HI and chiral 1-iodo-2-methylbutane molecules illustrate that these analytical results also hold for multiphoton ionization processes.