The interdepartmental laboratory CD LAB, which involves also the participation of the Department of Mathematics and of the Department of Chemistry, Materials, and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta", represents an infrustructure aimed at developing novel techniques for the analysis of chiral molecules byh means of electromagnetic radiation.
The research aticities are focused on the enginnering of nanostructured systems to enhance the snesitivity of the electromagnetic radiation towards the different enantiomers of a molecular species. Applications range from the study of chiral molecules and drugs to the assessment of the absolute configuration of chiral molecules and proteins. The experimental activities are supported by computational activities with quanto-mechanical modeling of molecular spectroscopies, electromagnetic modeling of nanostructured systems, and statistical analysis of complex functional data from molecular spectroscopies.

Instrumentation

Setup for chiral spectroscopy by means of vibrational circular dichroism in the mid-infrared spectral region. The system comprises a Bruker INVENIO interferometer and a polarization modulation module Bruker PMA50.
Setup for chiral optical micro-spectroscopy in the visible spectral range by means of electronic circular dichroism. The experimental system is based on a confocal and scanning probe microscope (WITec AlphaSNOM) especially designed to work with polarized light, a grating spectrometer for the visible spectral range, a prism-based spectrometer for the near-infrared spectral range, cw and pulsed laser sources.

Publications

• G. Pellegrini, M. Finazzi, M. Celebrano, L. Duò, and P. Biagioni, “Chiral surface waves for enhanced circular dichroism”, Phys. Rev. B 95, 241402(R) (2017).
• G. Pellegrini, M. Finazzi, M. Celebrano, L. Duò, and P. Biagioni, “Surface-enhanced chiroptical spectroscopy with superchiral surface waves”, Chirality 30, 883 (2018).
• F. Patti, R. Saija, P. Denti, G. Pellegrini, P. Biagioni, M. A. Iatì, and O. M. Maragò, “Chiral optical tweezers for optically active particles in the T-matrix formalism”, Scientific Reports 9, 29 (2019).
• G. Pellegrini, M. Finazzi, M. Celebrano, L. Duò, M. A. Iatì, O. M. Maragò, and P. Biagioni, “Superchiral surface waves for all-optical enantiomer separation”, J. Phys. Chem. C 123, 28336 (2019).
• F. Mattioli, G. Mazzeo, G. Longhi, S. Abbate, G. Pellegrini, M. Celebrano, M. Finazzi, L. Duò, C. Zanchi, M. tommasini, M. Pea, S. Cibella, F. Sciortino, L. Baldassarre, A. Nucara, M. Ortolani, and P. Biagioni, “Plasmonic superchiral lattice resonances in the mid-infrared”, arXiv:1907.03586 (2020).