Enantiodetection of chiral molecules via two-dimensional spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optical enantiodetection technique using two-dimensional spectroscopy driven by three electromagnetic fields, enabling sensitive determination of enantiomeric excess through peak intensity analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a new 2D spectroscopy method for enantiodetection that overcomes the sensitivity limitations of traditional optical techniques by leveraging chirality-dependent frequency shifts.

Findings

Effective differentiation of enantiomers via 2D spectral peak intensities.

Enhanced sensitivity compared to traditional magnetic-dipole methods.

Potential for accurate enantiomeric excess measurement.

Abstract

Enantiodetection of chiral molecules is important to pharmaceutical drug production, chemical reaction control, and biological function designs. Traditional optical methods of enantiodetection rely on the weak magnetic-dipole or electric-quadrupole interactions, and in turn suffer from the weak signal and low sensitivity. We propose a new optical enantiodetection method to determine the enantiomeric excess via two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy of the chiral mixture driven by three electromagnetic fields. The quantities of left- and right- handed chiral molecules are reflected by the intensities of different peaks on the 2D spectrum, separated by the chirality-dependent frequency shifts resulting from the relative strong electric-dipole interactions between the chiral molecules and the driving fields. Thus, the enantiomeric excess can be determined via the intensity ratio of the peaks for the two enantiomers.