Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Chirality is a property that many molecules possess. It is often compared to handedness since chiral molecules are identical except for being right- or left-handed. Chirality is widely prevalent in nature: from the spiral of snail shells to the helical twist in DNA. Nineteen of the twenty essential amino acids are chiral, and in mammalian species, these exist only in their left-handed forms. Chirality also plays an important role in materials chemistry. Chiral devices are used in a broad range of applications to control and manipulate light. For example, chiral smectic liquid crystal films switch the pixels of liquid crystal displays on and off thousands of times faster than current commercial liquid crystal-based devices. These chiral liquid crystal-based devices represent the next generation of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens, and also have potential uses in telecom applications as switchable waveguides and interconnects and in high-resolution 2-D and 3-D (holographic) projection. Magnetoresistance in chiral nanostructures may enable development of novel magnetic field sensors for use in magnetic memory devices (hard disks and magnetic solid state memory), allowing increased storage densities and data transfer rates. The recent emergence of 3D cinema is a good example of the application of chiral materials, where they are used to rapidly project alternate left- and right-eye images in orthogonal circular polarizations (the glasses worn by the audience filter the projected images to each eye creating the 3D effect). Older technologies used linearly polarized light, and induced nausea due to sensitivity to head tilt. The circular polarizers now used greatly reduce these effects. With an increasing number of applications of chiral materials, there is an increasing need to prepare and analyze these unique structures. However, the analysis of the chirality of chiral solids and films is extremely difficult. One method is to use Diffuse Reflectance Circular Dichroism (CD), which is a modification of a regular CD instrument such that many of the artifacts and difficulties associated with carrying out the CD of solids are eliminated. This instrument is also designed so that sensitive films and hydrogels can be analyzed while they sit horizontally.