A step-by-step workflow to extract the genuine circular dichroism of thin films
Abstract
Circular Dichroism (CD) spectroscopy has evolved from a purely solution based method towards a powerful tool in the analysis of chiral thin films. Although a straightforward technique, the genuine CD signal is often accompanied by artifacts arising from optical anisotropy and instrumental imperfections. This tutorial presents a two-step workflow that reliably isolates the orientation invariant CD response for anisotropic thin films by combining azimuthal sample rotation with sample flipping. For this purpose, a home-built sample stage was developed, which enables systematic suppression of many anisotropy-induced artifacts in commercial CD spectrophotometers. Both a detailed description of the setup itself as well as the needed python script are provided. The reliability of the workflow is demonstrated on two selected samples from different research fields: chiral molecules attached to metallic surfaces as well as metal halide perovskites incorporating chiral spacer molecules
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.24653,
title = {A step-by-step workflow to extract the genuine circular dichroism of thin films},
author = {Franziska Schölzel and Arina Narudin and Aleksandra Ciesielska and Alexander Ehm and Dietrich R. T. Zahn and Wouter van Gompel and Simon Kahmann and Georgeta Salvan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24653},
year = {2026}
}