Vibrational optical activity

Although optical activity in chiral molecules was discovered almost two centuries ago, it was not until the early 1970s that optical activity in vibrational spectra was observed. Thanks to progress in experiment, theory and computation, powerful chiroptical spectroscopies based on vibrational optical activity measurements have evolved rapidly. We review the basic theory and recent applications of the Raman and infrared approaches, emphasising the impact ab initio calculations are making on simulation of vibrational optical activity spectra to extract detailed structures, including the absolute configuration and conformer populations, of chiral molecular and biomolecular species, and discuss many new features that are emerging.