Reply to a comment concerning “Linear polarization Raman optical activity as a new form of natural optical activity”

✍ Scribed by Lutz Hecht; Laurence A. Nafie

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 227 KB
• Volume: 195
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0009-2614
• DOI: 10.1016/0009-2614(92)85577-w

✦ Synopsis

Recently, we introduced linear polarization Raman optical activity (LP ROA) as a new form of natural optical activity (NAO) [ 1 ] for small chiral molecules under resonance scattering conditions randomly oriented in an optically isotropic phase (in the absence of any externally applied electromagnetic fields). We also identified corresponding measurements in right-angle scattering involving polarization modulation between orthogonal + 45' linear polarization states in the incident and scattered beam or in both beams simultaneously to detect incident, scattered and dual linear polarization (ILP, SLP and DLP) ROA, respectively [ 11. Our paper apparently prompted the current comments by Harris and McClain [ 21. Here we present our reply to their comments. Any natural optical activity observable represents a time-even pseudoscalar [ 3 1. A direct consequence of this statement is that only the non-diagonal Mueller matrix elements Mi k, Mkl, A42k and Mk2 for k=O, 3 can contain relevant non-vanishing analytical NAO information or odd functions thereof [ 41. Any (currently known and future) experiments for NAO detection can therefore be described by one of or an appropriate combination of only these eight