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

Optical activity (OA) spectroscopy 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. Due to the considerably weak effect, OA spectral analysis has high demands on measurement speed and sensitivity, especially for organic biomolecules. Moreover, gas-phase OA measurements require higher resolution to resolve Doppler-limited profiles. Here, we show the unmatched potential of dual-comb spectroscopy (DCS) in magnetic optical activity spectroscopy (MOAS) of gas-phase molecules with the resolution of hundred-MHz level and the high-speed measurement of sub-millisecond level. As a demonstration, we achieved the rapid, high-precision and high-resolution MOAS measurement of the nitrogen dioxide $${\upsilon }_{1}$$ υ 1 + $${\upsilon }_{3}$$ υ 3 band and the nitric oxide overtone band, which can be used to analyze fine structure of molecules. Besides, the preliminary demonstration of liquid-phase chiroptical activity (as weak as 10−5) has been achieved with several seconds of sampling time, which could become a routine approach enabling ultrafast dynamics analysis of chiral structural conformations.