Evanescent-wave and open-air chiral sensing via signal-reversing cavity-enhanced polarimetry

Sensing chirality is of fundamental importance to many fields, including analytical and biological chemistry, pharmacology, and fundamental physics. Recent developments have extended optical chiral sensing using microwaves, fs pulses, superchiral light, and photoionization. The most widely used methods are the traditional methods of circular dichroism and optical rotation (OR). However, chiral signals are typically very weak, and their measurement is limited by larger time-dependent backgrounds and by imperfect and slow subtraction procedures. Here, we demonstrate a pulsed-laser bowtie-cavity-enhanced polarimeter with counter-propagating beams, which solves these background problems: the chiral signals are enhanced by the number of cavity passes; the effects of linear birefringence are suppressed by a large induced intracavity Faraday rotation; and rapid signal reversals are effected by reversing the Faraday rotation and subtracting signals from the counter-propagating beams. These advantages allow measurements of absolute chiral signals in environments where background subtractions are not feasible: we measure optical rotation from chiral vapour in open air, and from chiral liquids in the evanescent wave (EW) produced by total internal reflection at a prism surface. EW-OR of (+)-maltodextrin and (-)-fructose solutions confirm the Drude-Condon model for Maxwell's equations in isotropic optically active media. In particular, the effective optical rotation path length, near index matching, is equal to the Goos-Hänchen shift of the EW. The limits of this polarimeter, when using a continuous-wave laser locked to a stable high-finesse cavity, should match sensitivity measurements for linear birefringence ($3\times 10^{-13}$ rad), which is several orders of magnitude more sensitive than current chiral detection limits, transforming the power of chiral sensing in many fields.