Technologies are generally described for systems and methods for detecting chiral properties of materials and separating materials based on their chiral properties. A chiral vector is constructed from anisotropy properties of a polarization-dependent output signal from a sample. Different types of molecules from the sample can be differentiated based on a magnitude of the chiral vector. Chiral properties of the sample can be detected based on an angle of the chiral vector. The output signal can be a fluorescent emission from the sample and can be used to detect chiral properties of a substantially opaque sample.