Volume 38, Issue 6 pp. 971-983
Review

Relevance of the Second Harmonic Generation to Characterize Crystalline Samples

Florent Simon

Florent Simon

Normandie Université, Crystal Genesis Unit, SMS, EA 3233, Université de Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.

The first two authors contributed equally to this paper.

Search for more papers by this author
Simon Clevers

Simon Clevers

Normandie Université, Crystal Genesis Unit, SMS, EA 3233, Université de Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.

The first two authors contributed equally to this paper.

Search for more papers by this author
Valérie Dupray

Corresponding Author

Valérie Dupray

Normandie Université, Crystal Genesis Unit, SMS, EA 3233, Université de Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.

Normandie Université, Crystal Genesis Unit, SMS, EA 3233, Université de Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.Search for more papers by this author
Gérard Coquerel

Gérard Coquerel

Normandie Université, Crystal Genesis Unit, SMS, EA 3233, Université de Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 08 May 2015
Citations: 33

Abstract

The application of powder second harmonic generation (P-SHG), temperature-resolved SHG (TR-SHG), and SHG microscopy (SHGM) in the characterization of bulk crystalline samples is illustrated. P-SHG applied to powder samples can be an extremely sensitive approach to detect the absence of an inversion center in crystalline structures, TR-SHG serves to monitor temperature-induced phase transitions, and SHGM is used in the detection of non-centrosymmetric zones inside a heterogeneous material. These methods are of great relevance, e.g., in the pharmaceutical industry where crystalline active pharmaceutical ingredients are often made of a single enantiomer and are therefore non-centrosymmetric. Herein, several examples are provided to describe how a given SHG signal should be interpreted. A general procedure to carry out a P-SHG experiment is illustrated in detail.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.