23 February 2024 | Aritra Biswas, Pablo Cencillo-Abad, Muhammad W. Shabbir, Manobina Karmakar, Debashis Chanda
The paper presents a nanostructured platform for surface-enhanced infrared absorption-induced vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) based on an achiral plasmonic system. This platform enables precise measurement, differentiation, and quantification of enantiomeric mixtures, including concentration and enantiomeric excess determination. The experimental results show a 13 orders of magnitude higher detection sensitivity for chiral enantiomers compared to conventional VCD spectroscopic techniques, accounting for respective path lengths and concentrations. The tunable spectral characteristics of the achiral plasmonic system facilitate the detection of a diverse range of chiral compounds. The platform's simplicity, tunability, and exceptional sensitivity hold significant potential for enantiomer classification in drug design, pharmaceuticals, and biological applications. The system is easy to fabricate using a simple large-area nanoimprinting technique and can be reused after simple cleaning steps, making it suitable for highly sensitive, high-throughput, and low-cost enantiomeric purity determination in pharmaceutical and drug industries.The paper presents a nanostructured platform for surface-enhanced infrared absorption-induced vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) based on an achiral plasmonic system. This platform enables precise measurement, differentiation, and quantification of enantiomeric mixtures, including concentration and enantiomeric excess determination. The experimental results show a 13 orders of magnitude higher detection sensitivity for chiral enantiomers compared to conventional VCD spectroscopic techniques, accounting for respective path lengths and concentrations. The tunable spectral characteristics of the achiral plasmonic system facilitate the detection of a diverse range of chiral compounds. The platform's simplicity, tunability, and exceptional sensitivity hold significant potential for enantiomer classification in drug design, pharmaceuticals, and biological applications. The system is easy to fabricate using a simple large-area nanoimprinting technique and can be reused after simple cleaning steps, making it suitable for highly sensitive, high-throughput, and low-cost enantiomeric purity determination in pharmaceutical and drug industries.