Second Harmonic Scattering (SHS) is a novel technique for studying mechanisms of solubility, aggregation and molecular self-assembly in dipolar solvents. Its application has been limited so far to photonics laboratories with access to tailor made setups on optical benches in a laser class 4 safety laboratory. Here, we report validation experiments obtained using the new ORYL F1, the first commercially available microtiter wellplate-based laboratory SHS instrument. Using H₂O/D₂O mixtures as reference samples, we showcase its high throughput and high accuracy performance at very low sample consumption.
Water is a liquid essential for biological phenomena due to its unique hydrogenbond (H-bond) network. Substituting hydrogen in light water (H₂O) with deuterium in heavy water (D₂O) profoundly affects its physical properties. These changes arise from nuclear quantum effects that modify intermolecular interactions. SHS is highly sensitive to molecular ordering, showing 40% higher intensity for D₂O in SSS polarization combination, linked to its stiffer H-bond network. D₂O/H₂O mixtures provide a robust calibration for SHS with linearity across angular integration ranges, enabling broad applicability to different setups.
By benchmarking against the state-of-the art, optical-bench angular resolved SHS, with NMR tubes as sample holder in a goniometric configuration, we show that measurement quality of the calibration samples of H2O /D2O is retained between the two setups, with the advantage of ORYL’s bench-top instrument measuring at a 200x higher throughput and using 10x less sample.