Towards characterization and identification of solid state pharmaceutical mixtures through second harmonic generation.

In this paper, we report improvements to a previously developed method based on optical nonlinearity for characterizing polymorphism and concentration of pharmaceuticals in powdered and tablet form. An apparatus that measures the nonlinear optical response of a sample through second harmonic generation (SHG) is described. The response of several enalapril maleate-polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) tablets was measured, the results of which were used to determine the concentration of the drug.