Vertical Contact-Separation Process of Liquid Crystal Micro-Droplets for Chirality Sensing Mechanism

We propose a novel mechanism for visualizing the chirality of compounds in solution using a vertical contact-separation process (VCSP) of liquid crystal micro-droplets (LC mu Ds). By employing the VCSP between target micro-droplets and sensor LC mu Ds, the chiral compounds initially introduced in the target micro-droplets diffuse into coalescent micro-droplets. After the VCSP, we observed a wavelength shift in the selective reflection from the sensor LC mu Ds, allowing us to visualize the chirality present in the target micro-droplets. To quantitatively analyze the wavelength shift of the selective reflection, we utilized reflective spectroscopic techniques. Our findings demonstrate that the chirality sensing mechanism achieves a detection accuracy of 10 mu g. Moreover, this chiral sensing mechanism can be effectively applied to two-dimensional micro-droplet array systems. (c) 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.