High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The basic principle of Raman optical activity is that there is interference between light waves scattered by the polarizability and optical activity tensors of a chiral molecule, which leads to a difference between the intensities of the right- and left-handed circularly polarised scattered beams. The spectrum of intensity differences recorded over a range of wavenumbers reveals information about chiral centres in the sample molecule. Raman optical activity can be observed in a number of forms, depending on the polarization of the incident and the scattered light.