Circularly polarized infrared and visible sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy: Vibrational optical activity measurement

Vibrational optical activity spectroscopies utilizing either circularly polarized it or circularly polarized visible beams were theoretically investigated by considering the infrared and visible sum-frequency-generation (IV-SFG) schemes. In addition to the purely electric dipole-allowed chiral component of the IV-SFG susceptibility, the polarizability-electric quadrupole hyperpolarizability term also contributes to the vibrationally resonant IV-SFG susceptibility. The circular-intensity-difference signal is shown to be determined by the interferences between the all-electric dipole-allowed chiral component and the polarizability-electric-dipole or electric-dipole-electric- quadrupole Raman optical activity tensor components. The circularly polarized SFG methods are shown to be potentially useful coherent spectroscopic tools for determining absolute configurations of chiral molecules in condensed phases.