Rapid handheld time-resolved circularly polarised luminescence photography camera for life and material sciences

Abstract

Circularly polarised luminescence (CPL) is gaining a rapidly increasing following and finding new applications in both life and material sciences. Spurred by recent instrumental advancements, the development of CPL active chiral emitters is going through a renaissance, especially the design and synthesis of CPL active luminescent lanthanide complexes owing to their unique and robust photophysical properties. They possess superior circularly polarised brightness (CPB) and can encode vital chiral molecular fingerprints in their long-lived emission spectrum. However, their application as embedded CPL emitters in intelligent security inks has not yet been fully exploited. This major bottleneck is purely hardware related: there is currently no suitable compact CPL instrumentation available, and handheld CPL photography remains an uncharted territory. Here we present a solution: an all solid-state small footprint CPL camera with no moving parts to facilitate ad hoc time-resolved enantioselective differential chiral contrast (EDCC) based one-shot CPL photography (CPLP).

Circularly Polarized Microscopy of Thin Films of Chiral Organic Dyes

“…A discrete ECD microscopy technique adopting a CMOS camera as the detector and, thus, simultaneously acquiring the signal over all the pixels of the area studied was reported by Kahr et al to elucidate the enantiomorphous twinning of crystals of 1,8-dihydroxyanthraquinone . Besides ECD, microscopies based on the differential emission of left and right CP light (circularly polarized luminescence) from emitting chiral compounds were reported. − …”

Two-Photon Circularly Polarized Luminescence of Chiral Eu Complexes

“…The recent resurgence of chiral systems that emit efficient circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has attracted significant attention due to their potential applications in various fields, including photonics − and optoelectronics. , Trivalent luminescent lanthanide ions (Ln 3+ ) are widely used as optical probes for imaging − and luminescent sensing, − as well as in security tags − and OLED displays. − However, the use of chiral emissive lanthanide complexes in biological imaging is limited by the need to excite them using higher-energy UV light, which is damaging to cells and has poor depth of penetration . One solution is to excite the sample using two identical half-energy photons (half the energy – double the wavelength), which enables deep tissue imaging with high spatial resolution, making it a valuable tool in fields such as neuroscience and biology .…”

Magnetic Circularly Polarized Luminescence of Organic Compounds

“…[1] This technique is called circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). Beside spectroscopic information that the technique can provide, CPL-active molecules are interesting for several applications [2] ranging from bioprobes [3] to chiral electronics, [4] such as organic emitting diodes able to emit CP electroluminescence directly, i. e. without using polarizers or other passive elements (CP-OLEDs). [5] A similar, but conceptually different, selectivity of molecules towards CP light can be observed with achiral molecules as the differential absorption or emission in the presence of a sufficiently strong magnetic field parallel or antiparallel to the light beam.…”