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Dual-comb optical activity spectroscopy for the analysis of vibrational optical activity induced by external magnetic field

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At the beginning of 2023 scientific group from the East China Normal University, Shanghai published in Nature Communications an article where they describe a dual-comb optical activity spectroscopy using VIGO detector.

In the article authors present the unmatched potential of dual-comb spectroscopy in magnetic optical activity spectroscopy of gas-phase molecules with the resolution of hundred-MHz level and the high-speed measurement of sub-millisecond level. Researchers used mid-infrared interband cascade lasers centered at 3.37 µm as the signal of the nonlinear optical modulation process. Two slightly different optical combs were generated in the described system to obtain a dual-comb asynchronous optical sampling of the electric response of magnetic optical activity free-induction-decay. Signals interfere with each other and the final interferogram is focused on the photodetector PVI-4TE-3.4–2 × 2 made by VIGO Photonics working in 2.2 – 3.6 µm range. 

Scientist believe, that presented system is a powerful tool to characterize molecular chirality, explore the stereo-specific structure and, study the solution-state conformation of biomolecules, which is widely utilized in the fields of molecular chirality, pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry.

Link to the article