Related papers: Punctuated Chirality
Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the…
Chiral crystals, like chiral molecules, cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images -- a fundamental property that has been linked to interesting physical behavior and exploited in functional devices. Among the simplest inorganic…
The dominant paradigm in origin of life research is that of an RNA world. However, despite experimental progress towards the spontaneous formation of RNA, the RNA world hypothesis still has its problems. Here, we introduce a novel…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…
Chiral systems exhibit unique properties traditionally linked to their asymmetric spatial arrangement. Recently, multiple laser pulses were shown to induce purely electronic chiral states without altering the nuclear configuration. Here, we…
Chirality is a fundamental concept in physics that underpins various phenomena in nonlinear optics, quantum physics, and topological photonics. Although the spin of a photon naturally brings chirality, orbital angular momentum can also…
During the early developmental process of organisms, the formation of the left-right laterality requires a subtle mechanism, as it is associated with other principal body axes. Any inherent chiral feature in an egg cell can in principal…
Recent experiments on aligned DNA show hexatic order with no sign of macroscopic chirality. I make the analogy between smectic liquid crystals and chiral hexatics and show how the absence of chirality cannot occur in a thermodynamic phase…
Molecular chirality is conventionally understood as space-inversion-symmetry breaking in the equilibrium structure of molecules. Less well known is that achiral molecules can be made chiral through extreme rotational excitation. Here, we…
Chirality describes the asymmetry between an object and its mirror image and manifests itself in diverse functionalities across all scales of matter - from molecules and aggregates to thin films and bulk chiral materials. A particularly…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Photosynthesis is an ancient metabolic process that began on the early Earth, offering plentiful energy to organisms that utilize it, to the extent that they can achieve global significance. The potential exists for similar processes to…
Chiral active matter is a variant of active matter systems in which the motion of the constituent particles violates mirror symmetry. In this letter, we simulate two-dimensional chiral Active Brownian Particles, the simplest chiral model in…
We investigate the interplay between chirality and confinement in harmonically trapped active particles. The circular character of chiral motion combines with the radial symmetry of the potential to create distinctive non-equilibrium…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
Chirality is an important concept that describes the asymmetry property of a system, which usually emerges spontaneously due to mirror symmetry breaking. Such spontaneous chirality manifests predominantly as parity breaking in modern…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
Optical chirality has been recently suggested to complement the physically relevant conserved quantities of the well-known Maxwell's equations. This time-even pseudoscalar is expected to provide further insight in polarization phenomena of…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
Recently the first chemical systems which show the amplification of enantiometric excess (ee) was found. Inspired by these experiments, we propose a few chemical reaction models in a closed system. The reactions consist of autocatalytic…