Nov. 19 2001
  
My second experiment is to observe some optical properties of chiral
films.  I will use polarized light (circular polarized or linear
polarized). When the light transmits through the thin films, we may
expect the change of the polarization and intensity of the light due to
the special structure of the molecules.

I may get the sample on next Tuesday, now I am reading some literatures.


Nov. 20 2001

Find a paper written by Robbie in Nature, 1996. He found that when
linearly polarized light is incident on a helical sculptured thin
film along the film's helical axis, the transmitted light exhibits a
rotation of the plane of polarization.The rotation around 633 nm is
about 1.5 degree, which is very small. But at 532 nm, the rotation
is about 2.7 degree, which is bigger. If we have more than one laser
source, I want to try.


Nov. 29 2001

Noe and I went to the a small company named Spectrum Thin Films
today. They can fabricate thin films using physical deposition
method. Thus we try to see if chiral thin films can be made there.
To make chiral thin films, the substrate should tilt in a very large
angle and rotate along the axis normal to the surface of the
substrate (according to Robbie's articles). It seems that the
company doesn't have a device to realize such kind of work. But we
talked a lot and I think I learned something.