Related papers: On the Biological Advantage of Chirality
Chirality refers to a geometric phenomenon in which objects are not superimposable on their mirror image. Structures made of nano-scale chiral elements can display chiroptical effects, such as dichroism for left- and right- handed…
Most biomolecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other. However, life is homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively levorotatory (L) amino acids, while only dextrorotatory (R) sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism…
In this paper, we discuss microscopic models for chiral active particles, i.e., rotating active units that exhibit circular or spinning motion. While non-chiral active particles are typically governed by self-propulsion and conservative…
Throughout biology, hierarchy is a recurrent theme in the geometry of structures where strength is achieved with minimal use of material. Acting over vast timescales, evolution has brought about beautiful solutions to problems of…
Chirality, either of light or matter, has proved to be very practical in biosensing and nanophotonics. However, the fundamental understanding of its temporal dynamics still needs to be discovered. A realistic setup for this are the…
The concept of chirality makes ubiquitous appearance in nature. Particularly, both a structure and its collective excitations may acquire well defined chiralities. In this work, we reveal an intrinsic connection between the chiralities of a…
We study a two-dimensional chiral active crystal composed of underdamped chiral active particles. These particles, characterized by intrinsic handedness and persistence, interact via linear forces derived from harmonic potentials. Chirality…
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…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
We suggest that electromagnetic chirality, generally displayed by 3D or 2D complex chiral structures, can occur in 1D patterned composites whose components are achiral. This feature is highly unexpected in a 1D system which is geometrically…
We use continuum theory to show that chirality is a key thermodynamic control parameter for the aggregation of biopolymers: chirality produces a stable disperse phase of hexagonal bundles under moderately poor solvent conditions, as has…
Chiral nanostructures offer the ability to respond to the vector nature of a light beam at the nanoscale. While naturally chiral materials offer a path towards scalability, engineered structures offer a path to wavelength tunability through…
We introduce meta-diastereomers, hybrid systems where molecular chirality ($\leq 10$\,nm) and nanoscale chirality ($>100$\,nm) combine to create a new hierarchical chiral state with emergent optical properties. By coupling chiral…
Chiral magnetism, wherein there is a preferred sense of rotation of the magnetization, has become a key aspect for future spintronic applications. It determines the chiral nature of magnetic textures, such as skyrmions, domain walls or spin…
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…
Molecules that only differ by their chirality, so called enantiomers, often possess different properties with respect to their biological function. Therefore, the separation of enantiomers presents a prominent challenge in molecular biology…
Active matter describes materials whose constituents are driven out of equilibrium by continuous energy consumption, for instance from ATP. Due to the orientable character of the constituents, active suspensions can attain liquid…
Chirality, a fundamental property of asymmetric structures, plays a crucial role in pharmaceutical, biological and chemical systems, offering a powerful tool for screening organic compounds. While the conventional optical chirality…
Chirality is breaking of mirror symmetry in matter. In the fields of biology and chemistry, this is particularly important because some of the essential molecules in life such as amino acids and DNA have chirality. It is a long-standing…
We analyze the pattern formation in systems of active particles with chiral forces in the context of pedestrian dynamics. To describe the interparticle interactions, we use the standard social force model and supplement it with a new type…