All Optical Determination of Microscopic and Macroscopic Structure of Chiral, Polar Microcrystals from Achiral, Nonpolar Molecules

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• 作者：Stijn Van Cleuvenbergen ; Gunther Hennrich ; Pieter Willot ; Guy Koeckelberghs ; Koen Clays ; Thierry Verbiest ; Monique A. van der Veen
• 刊名：The Journal of Physical Chemistry C
• 出版年：2012
• 出版时间：June 7, 2012
• 年：2012
• 卷：116
• 期：22
• 页码：12219-12225
• 全文大小：360K
• 年卷期：v.116,no.22(June 7, 2012)
• ISSN：1932-7455

文摘

Organic microcrystals obtained from an octupolar molecule are studied by polarized nonlinear optical microscopy. While two-photon fluorescence microscopy is employed to verify the monocrystallinity of the analyzed domains, second-harmonic generation microscopy allowed determination of the point group symmetry of the crystallites. This combined analysis revealed that the achiral, octupolar molecules form chiral and polar conglomerate structures; the former are confirmed by circular dichroism spectroscopy. We additionally present a convenient and straightforward image analysis protocol, based on polarization dependent second-harmonic generation microscopy. This allows assessing the local organization and homogeneity of crystalline structures, which is highly relevant for technological applications, with high resolution and sensitivity.