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Related papers: Chirality: A Scientific Leitmotif

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Chirality, or handedness, is a topic that is common in biology and chemistry, yet is rarely discussed in physics courses. We provide a way of introducing the topic in classical physics, and demonstrate the merits of its inclusion - such as…

Popular Physics · Physics 2020-06-17 Chris L. Lin

Chirality, or handedness, enters astrophysics in three distinct ways. Magnetic field and vortex lines tend to be helical and have a systematic twist in the northern and southern hemispheres of a star or a galaxy. Helicity is here driven by…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2022-05-06 Axel Brandenburg

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…

General Physics · Physics 2025-07-22 Sang-Wook Cheong , Fei-Ting Huang

Synthetic chiral light fields were recently introduced as a novel source of chirality [Ayuso et al. Nat. Phot. 13, 866 (2019)]. This locally-chiral light spans a three-dimensional polarization that plots a chiral trajectory in space-time,…

Optics · Physics 2022-02-21 Ofer Neufeld , Oren Cohen

Chirality, handedness, is one of the most fundamental intriguing asymmetries in nature. By definition, chiral objects cannot be superimposed onto each other after mirror reflection operation. Numerous examples of chiral structures can be…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2020-04-06 See-Hun Yang

Chirality, an inherent property of most objects of the universe, is a dynamic research topic in material science, physics, chemistry, and biology. The fundamental appeal of this extensive study is supported by the technological quest to…

Materials Science · Physics 2024-07-01 Igor Luk'yanchuk , Anna Razumnaya , Svitlana Kondovych , Yurii Tikhonov , Valerii M. Vinokur

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…

Materials Science · Physics 2024-09-12 Hiroaki Kusunose , Jun-ichiro Kishine , Hiroshi M. Yamamoto

We develop a family of chiral measures to quantify the chirality of a distribution and assign it a handedness. Our measures are built using the tensorial moments of the distribution, which naturally encode its spatial character, not only…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2026-03-31 Emilio Pisanty , Nicola Mayer , Andrés Ordóñez , Alexander Löhr , Margarita Khokhlova

Chirality, an intrinsic handedness, is one of the most intriguing fundamental phenomena in nature. Materials composed of chiral molecules find broad applications in areas ranging from nonlinear optics and spintronics to biology and…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2020-03-09 Yu. Tikhonov , S. Kondovych , J. Mangeri , M. Pavlenko , L. Baudry , A. Sené , A. Galda , S. Nakhmanson , O. Heinonen , A. Razumnaya , I. Luk'yanchuk , V. M. Vinokur

Chirality, or handedness, is a geometrical property denoting a lack of mirror symmetry. Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and is associated with the non-reciprocal interactions observed in complex systems ranging from biomolecules to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-08-08 Jonah S. Peter , Stefan Ostermann , Susanne F. Yelin

Chirality or the handedness of objects is of prime importance in life science, biology, chemistry and physics. It is also a major symmetry ingredient in frustrated magnets revealing spin-spiral ground states. Vector chiral phases, with the…

Mathematics is changing. Computers are verifying proofs, checking calculations, and exploring complex structures that would overwhelm human effort. Yet curiosity-driven research is where tomorrow's breakthroughs are quietly prepared. In…

History and Overview · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Claire Burrin

``Chirality'' is a multispin quantity representing the sense or the handedness of the noncollinear spin structures induced by spin frustration. Recent studies have revealed that the chirality often plays an important role in the ordering of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-04-20 Hikaru Kawamura

Chirality ubiquitously appears in nature, however, its quantification remains obscure owing to the lack of microscopic description at the quantum-mechanical level. We propose a way of evaluating chirality in terms of electric toroidal…

Materials Science · Physics 2024-05-22 Akane Inda , Rikuto Oiwa , Satoru Hayami , Hiroshi M Yamamoto , Hiroaki Kusunose

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2014-01-21 Efi Efrati , William T. M. Irvine

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in chiral phonons, lattice vibrations carrying angular momentum and exhibiting handedness, as revealed by helicity-dependent optical phenomena. Despite this progress, a quantitative…

Chirality is a pervasive property of matter that underpins many important phenomena across physics, chemistry and biology. Given its broad significance, the development of protocols for rational control of chirality in solid state systems…

Materials Science · Physics 2025-10-27 Z. Zeng , M. Först , M. Fechner , X. Deng , A. Cavalleri , P. G. Radaelli

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…

Optics · Physics 2020-04-14 David Ayuso , Andres Ordonez , Piero Decleva , Misha Ivanov , Olga Smirnova

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Gideon Gilat

We compare the various chirality measures most widely used in the literature to quantify chiral symmetry in extended solids, i.e., the continuous chirality measure, the Hausdorff distance, and the angular momentum. By studying these…

Materials Science · Physics 2026-02-09 Fernando Gómez-Ortiz , Mauro Fava , Emma E. McCabe , Aldo H. Romero , Eric Bousquet
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