Related papers: Spontaneous Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Planar Pol…

I consider the microscopic mechanisms by which a particular left-right (L/R) asymmetry is generated at the organism level from the microscopic handedness of cytoskeletal molecules. In light of a fundamental symmetry principle, the typical…

Understanding chirality transfer from the molecular to the macroscopic scale poses a significant challenge in soft and biological condensed matter physics. Many nanorods of biological origin not only have chiral molecular features but also…

In multicellular organisms, epithelial cells form layers separating compartments responsible for different physiological functions. At the early stage of epithelial layer formation, each cell of an aggregate defines an inner and an outer…

In condensed matter physics, a broad spectrum of physical characteristics, such as chirality, axiality, and polarity, arises as a direct consequence of the underlying symmetry of the system. We here theoretically investigate the effective…

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…

Polar active particles constitute a wide class of synthetic colloids that are able to propel along a preferential direction, given by their polar axis. Here, we demonstrate a generic self-phoretic mechanism that leads to their spontaneous…

Chirality is a pervasive form of symmetry that is intimately connected to the physical properties of solids, as well as the chemical and biological activity of molecular systems. However, its control with light is challenging, because…

Chiral symmetry breaking occurs when a physical or chemical process, with no preference for the production of one or other enantiomer, spontaneously generates a large excess of one of the two enantiomers: (L), left-handed or (D), right…

Chirality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in which a symmetry between left- and right-handed objects is broken, examples in nature ranging from subatomic particles and molecules to living organisms. In particle physics, the weak force is…

Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of bacterial…

Many of the biological phenomena involve collective dynamics driven by self-propelled motion and nonequilibrium force (i.e., activity) that result in features unexpected from equilibrium physics. On the other hand, biological experiments…

We show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…

Chirality is a feature of many biological systems and much research has been focused on understanding the origin and implications of this property. Famously, sugars and amino acids found in nature are homochiral, i.e., chiral symmetry is…

The occurrence of biological homochirality is attributed to symmetry breaking mechanisms which are still debatable1. Studies of symmetry breaking require tools for monitoring the population ratios of individual chiral nano-objects, such as…

It has been long recognized that the spatial polarization of the electronic clouds in molecules, and the spatial arrangements of atoms into chiral molecular structures, play crucial roles in physics, chemistry and biology. However, these…

To understand the relationship between the chirality of individual cells and that of tissues and organisms, we have developed a chiral polarized particle model to investigate the movement of cell populations on substrates. Our model…

Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is known to…

Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…

We study quantum systems with broken symmetry that can be modelled as cyclic three-level atoms with coexisting one- and two-photon transitions. They can be selectively optically excited to any state. As an example, we show that left- and…

The origin of recently observed spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in polar fluids is an unsolved problem, and poses fundamental questions as to how heliconical structures emerge in systems composed of achiral molecules. We report on the…