Photoionization of Oriented Systems and Circular Dichroism

Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a modification of normal absorption spectroscopy using circularly polarized light instead of unpolarized light for determining the difference in the absorption coefficients for right and left circularly polarized light, respectively, in optically active samples. Thus, there is nothing mysterious about CD spectroscopy. However, relative to most other spectroscopic techniques there seems to be a large psychological barrier in its application and at least physicists often regard CD, and optical activity in general, as a rather obscure technique without any useful application. There are some understandable reasons for this attitude, manifesting themselves…