Related papers: Detection of circular polarization in light scatte…
Context. Homochirality is a generic and unique property of life on Earth and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the incident light that it reflects. Because this…
Homochirality is a generic and unique property of all biochemical life and the fractional circular polarization of light it induces therefore constitutes a potentially unambiguous biosignature.} However, while high-quality circular…
Biological molecules are characterized by an intrinsic asymmetry known as homochirality. The result is optical activity of biological materials and circular polarization in the light scattered by microorganisms, cells of living organisms,…
Homochirality is a generic and unique property of all biochemical life and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Upon interaction with unpolarized light, homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the light…
We describe circular polarization as a remote sensing diagnostic of chiral signatures which may be applied to Mars. The remarkable phenomenon of homochirality provides a unique biosignature which can be amenable to remote sensing through…
Photosynthesis is an ancient metabolic process that began on the early Earth, offering plentiful energy to organisms that utilize it, to the extent that they can achieve global significance. The potential exists for similar processes to…
Does life exist outside our Solar System? A first step towards searching for life outside our Solar System is detecting life on Earth by using remote sensing applications. One powerful and unambiguous biosignature is the circular…
Our Earth, being the only living planet that we know, provides us with clues that photosynthetic life-forms may be dominant on other exoplanets for billions of years. Spectropolarimetric signatures of the terrestrial photosynthetic life…
Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an essential technique for understanding molecular structure and magnetic materials, but spatial resolution is limited by the wavelength of light, and sensitivity sufficient for single-molecule…
Photosynthetic eukaryotes show a remarkable variability in photosynthesis, including large differences in light harvesting proteins and pigment composition. In vivo circular spectropolarimetry enables us to probe the molecular architecture…
Chirality is at the origin of life and is ubiquitous in nature. An object is deemed chiral if it is non-superimposable with its own mirror image. This relates to how circularly polarized light interacts with such object, a circular…
Strong enhancement of molecular circular dichroism has the potential to enable efficient asymmetric photolysis, a method of chiral separation that has conventionally been impeded by insufficient yield and low enantiomeric excess. Here, we…
(abridged) We review recent studies of chirality using circularly polarized light, along with the birth and evolution of life and planetary systems. Terrestrial life consists almost exclusively of one enantiomer, left-handed amino acids.…
We present the design of a point-and-shoot non-imaging full-Stokes spectropolarimeter dedicated to detecting life on Earth from an orbiting platform like the ISS. We specifically aim to map circular polarization in the spectral features of…
Depolarization of circularly polarized light scattered from biological tissues depends on structural changes in cell nuclei, which can provide valuable information for differentiating cancer tissues concealed in healthy tissues. In this…
We demonstrate that an effect phenomenologically analogous to circular dichroism can arise even for dielectric and isotropic chiral spherical particles. By analyzing the polarimetry of light scattered from a chiral, lossless microsphere…
Are we alone? In our quest to find life beyond Earth, we use our own planet to develop and verify new methods and techniques to remotely detect life. Our Life Signature Detection polarimeter (LSDpol), a snapshot full-Stokes…
Ultraviolet circularly polarised light has been suggested as the initial cause of the homochirality of organic molecules in terrestrial organisms, via enantiomeric selection of prebiotic molecules by asymmetric photolysis. We present a…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and fundamental in science, from particle physics to metamaterials.The most established technique of chiral discrimination - photoabsorption circular dichroism - relies on the magnetic properties of a…
Circular polarization spectroscopy has proven to be an indispensable tool in photosynthesis research and (bio)-molecular research in general. Oxygenic photosystems typically display an asymmetric Cotton effect around the chlorophyll…