Chirality – the non-superimposability of an object on its mirror image – shows its twists at all scales, from giant stellar galaxies to the electronic structure of materials. It enters into nearly every aspect of everyone’s daily routine without acknowledging it. Yet, it governs the stereochemistry of all molecular processes in nature, making them life-forming or life-incompatible. It makes the knowledge of molecular spatial configuration essential in pharmacy, medicine, and biochemistry. Here, by combining spectroscopic Mueller matrix ellipsometry and suitable theory, we experimentally demonstrate and theoretically verify the advantage of the proposed method to determine dispersion characteristics of molecular chirality. We first show how the Mueller matrix relates to both macroscopic and microscopic physical quantities used commonly in description of molecular chirality. Next, we experimentally determine quantitative observables such as specific rotation (with sensitivity 0.001 rad) of limonene enantiomers. We believe that our findings may provide a deeper insight into the problematics and potentially extend the scope of the state-of-the-art Mueller matrix ellipsometry beyond the classical optics and photonics.
The optical activity measurements have been widely performed using a simple polarimeter with a monochromatic source so far. This work introduces versatile and simple technique of the optical activity measurements using Mueller matrix spectroscopic ellipsometer (Woollam RC2-DI) with the spectral range from 0.73 eV to 6.42 eV (wavelength range from 193 nm to 1700 nm). First, we present the measurements of chiral solutions under constant temperature, where the dependences of the optical activity on solution concentration were determined. The measured spectra were compared to a dispersion model and the specific rotatory powers were calculated. Second, temperature-dependent measurements were performed using homemade, specially designed temperature control cells with 1 °C accuracy. The calculated specific rotatory powers were compared to commonly tabulated data for the wavelength of 589 nm with a good agreement, which proves us repeatability and robustness of the proposed method.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.