A Departmental Polarimeter

手性分子在自然界中无处不在。例子包括氨基酸、碳水化合物、生物活性天然产品和药用活性成分，它们可以作为两个可重叠镜像的混合物存在。然而，自然界通常只倾向于形成两个镜像中的一个(对映体)，这种偏好导致了将药物作为单一对映体合成的明显动机。两个对映体唯一不同的物理性质是它们与圆偏振光相互作用的能力，这导致旋光度是任何涉及富对映体分子的研究工作所必需的测量。获得旋光度所需的仪器是旋光计，世界上绝大多数化学部门都有这种仪器。

Chiral molecules are everywhere in Nature. Examples include amino acids, carbohydrates, bioactive natural products and pharmaceutical active ingredients that can exist as a mixture of two superimposable mirror images. However, Nature typically shows preference for the formation of only one of the two mirror images (enantiomers), and this preference results in a clear incentive to synthetize pharmaceuticals as single enantiomers. The only physical property that is different for two enantiomers is their ability to interact with circularly polarized light, which leads to optical rotation being a required measurement for any research endeavor involving enantioenriched molecules. The instrument required to acquire optical rotations is a polarimeter, and it is present in the vast majority of Chemistry Departments around the world.