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Photons experience mirror asymmetry of macroscopic chiral media, as incircular dichroism and polarization rotation, since left and right handedcircular polarizations differently couple with matter handedness. Conversely,free relativistic electrons with vanishing orbital angular momentum have nohandedness so the question arises whether they could sense chirality ofgeometrically symmetric macroscopic samples. In this Letter, we show thatmatter chirality breaks mirror symmetry of the scattered electrons quantumdecoherence, even when the incident electron wave function and the sample shapehave a common reflection symmetry plane. This is physically possible since thewave function transverse smearing triggers electron sensitivity to the spatialasymmetry of the electromagnetic interaction with the sample, as results fromour non-perturbative analysis of the scattered electron reduced density matrix,in the framework of macroscopic quantum electrodynamics. Furthermore, we provethat mirror asymmetry also shows up in the distribution of the electron lateralmomentum, orthogonal to the geometric symmetry plane, whose non-vanishing meanvalue reveals that the electron experiences a lateral mechanical interactionentirely produced by matter chirality.

Fast electrons interacting with chiral matter: mirror symmetry breaking of quantum decoherence and lateral momentum transfer