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

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