Rigorous Numerical Analysis of Plasmonically Enhanced Chiroptical Spectroscopy

Objects which cannot be superimposed with their mirror image are called chiral. Many biomolecules such as, e.g., the essential amino acids are chiral. One common method to probe their chiral nature is the interaction with circularly polarized light, which leads to a difference in the absorption depending on both the handedness of the molecule and that of the light. However, this so-called circular dichroism (CD) signal is small for most molecules, which renders such analysis rather challenging, especially when small volumes should be probed.