Sensitive detection of biomolecular chirality by nonlinear optical activity

We have studied nonlinear optical activity in second-harmonic generation from Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers of a synthetic chiral polymers. All observed effects are explained by a model that includes the contributions of both electric and magnetic dipole transitions to the second-order nonlinearity of the chiral surface. In this paper, we use samples of bacteriorhodopsin as an example to show that such nonlinear optical activity can be used as a sensitive probe of chiral environment of biological material.<
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