Related papers: Chirality in Astrophysics
Chirality occupies a central role in fields ranging from biological self-assembly to the design of optical metamaterials. The definition of chirality, as given by Lord Kelvin, associates chirality with the lack of mirror symmetry: the…
The flow of time moves in one direction in any spatial position and orientation in this universe. Chiral objects, which lack mirror symmetry, retain their chirality regardless of their position or orientation. Despite being seemingly…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
Chirality is ubiquitous from microscopic to macroscopic phenomena in physics and biology, such as fermionic interactions and DNA duplication. In photonics, chirality has traditionally represented differentiated optical responses for right…
In this article the concept of enantiomorphism is developed in terms of topological, rather than geometrical, concepts. Chirality is to be associated with enantiomorphic pairs which induce Optical Activity, while Helicity is to be…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
We have investigated the relationship between the morphology of helical particles and the features of the cholesteric (N$^\ast $) phase that they form. Using an Onsager-like theory, applied to systems of hard helices, we show that the…
Spiral galaxies are axi-symmetric objects showing 2D-chirality when projected onto a plane. Features in common with tetrahedral molecules are pointed out, in particular the existence of a preferred chiral modality for genetic galaxies as in…
The presence of asymmetry between fermions of opposite handedness in plasmas of relativistic particles can lead to exponential growth of a helical magnetic field via a small-scale chiral dynamo instability known as the chiral magnetic…
A clear understanding of chirality in spin-active electronic states is discussed in order to address confusions about chiral effects recently discovered in materials science. Electronic toroidal monopole $G_0$ can serve as a measure of…
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
Living organisms exhibit consistent homochirality. It is argued that the specific, binary choice made is not an accident but is a consequence of parity violation in the weak interaction expressed by cosmic irradiation. The secondary muons…
Spiral galaxies show axial symmetry and an intrinsic 2D-chirality. Environmental effects can influence the chirality of originally isolated stellar systems and a progressive loss of chirality can be recognised in the Hubble sequence. We…
Chirality is not just a structural artifact in biology but it may provide for a genuine biological advantage. This is due to the phenomenon of chiral interaction (CI) which is described here for mechanical-chiral devices. The main…
Using molecular simulations and classical density functional theory, we study the liquid-crystalline phase behaviour of a series of bent rod-like mesogens with a controlled degree of chirality introduced through a twist at the centre of the…
Chirality in inorganic nanoparticles and nanostructures has gained increasing scientific interest, because of the possibility to tune their ability to interact differently with left- and right-handed circularly polarized light. In some…
The origin of bio-homochirality is a subject of much debate. The emergence of chirality and life on earth is a break of symmetry to be compared with the breaks of symmetry in the evolution of the universe. Based on a perspective of…
Electron chirality has been proposed as a microscopic quantity that characterizes electronic handedness, yet its underlying control parameter has not been clearly identified. Furthermore, its applicability is limited to systems with…
Evidence for a parity-breaking nature of the magnetic buoyancy instability in a stably stratified gas is reported. In the absence of rotation, no helicity is produced, but the non-helical state is found to be unstable to small helical…
When we examine the chirality or observed handedness of the chromospheric and coronal structures involved in the long-term build-up to eruptive events, we find that they evolve in very specific ways to form two and only two sets of…