INFRARED AND RAMAN VIBRATIONAL OPTICAL-ACTIVITY - THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL ASPECTS

Advances in the field of vibrational optical activity (VOA) are review ed over the past decade. Topics are surveyed with an emphasis on the t heoretical and instrumental progress in both vibrational circular dich roism (VCD) and Raman optical activity (ROA). Applications of VOA to s tereochemical and biological problems are reviewed, with a bias toward new kinds of experiments made possible by theoretical and instrumenta l advances. In the field of VCD, the most notable advances have taken place in the quality and size of ab initio calculations of VOA intensi ties and in the quality of step-scan Fourier transform instrumentation . For ROA, the most dramatic progress has occurred in the areas of the oretical formulation and high-throughput instrumentation. Applications of VOA now include all major classes of biological and pharmaceutical molecules. VOA's importance as a diagnostic tool will likely grow as the control of molecular chirality increases in research and industria l areas.