Novel Chiroptical Spectroscopy Technique

Chiral objects typically exhibit a different extinction for the two circular polarizations of light. Researchers often detect the chirality of objects by measuring this extinction difference employing circular dichroism spectroscopy. In this Letter, we present a new spectroscopy technique for detecting the chirality of dipolar objects based on measuring the Stokes parameters at any nonforward angle. The chirality measure we introduce effectively eliminates achiral background noise and is independent of both the object’s concentration and the optical path length. Notably, when a solution contains both enantiomers of a chiral object, our method can discern which enantiomer predominates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the technique is robust and verifiable in situ by measuring the Stokes vector at two different nonforward angles of choice.