Ventsislav Valev and his team at the University of Bath were among the winners of the 2022 Royal Society of Chemistry’s Faraday Division Horizon Prize for the discovery of chiroptical harmonic scattering, showing that light scattered at higher harmonics is indeed sensitive to the chirality of the scatterers. 

“It is always a precious moment in science, when decades-old theory meets experimental observation,” says Valev of the discovery, which was theoretically predicted in 1979, but took another 40 years to demonstrate experimentally.