Chirality is pervasive in Nature and describes the property of an object not to be superimposable on its mirror image. To differentiate between the two mirror images of a chiral molecule, called enantiomers, one must probe them with a probe that is itself chiral. The probe can be of chemical nature, for example another chiral molecule, or of physical nature, for example a chiral light.
I will give examples of these two approaches. I will describe how laser spectroscopy at low temperature sheds light on the structural differences between the homochiral and heterochiral complexes of chiral biomolecules, such as amino acids or sugars.\footnote{Hirata, K.; Mori, Y.; Ishiuchi, S. I.; Fujii, M.; Zehnacker, A. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 2020, 22 (43), 24887-24894} \footnote{Tamura, M.; Sekiguchi, T.; Ishiuchi, S.-I.; Zehnacker-Rentien, A.; Fujii, M. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2019, (10), 2470-2474} Then I will illustrate the sensitivity of chiroptical spectroscopy to conformational isomerism and molecular interactions on the example of 1-indanol studied by Vibrational Circular Dichroism (VCD) in the condensed phase \footnote{Le Barbu-Debus, K.; Scherrer, A.; Bouchet, A.; Sebastiani, D.; Vuilleumier, R.; Zehnacker, A. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 2018, 20 (21), 14635-14646} and PhotoElectron Circular Dichroism (PECD) under jet-cooled conditions
