Related papers: On the Biological Advantage of Chirality

Chirality is a concept that one object is not superimposable on its mirror image by translation and rotation. In particular, chiral plasmonics have been widely investigated due to their excellent optical chiral properties, and have led to…

A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found…

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…

Optical chirality plays an essential role in chiral light-matter interactions with broad applications in sensing and spectroscopy. Conventional methods of generating optical chirality usually employ chiral structures or chiral excitations.…

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…

At the most fundamental level, the interaction between light and matter is manifested by the emission and absorption of single photons by single quantum emitters. Controlling light--matter interaction is the basis for diverse applications…

Ions in water are the liquid of life. Life occurs almost entirely in 'salt water'. Water itself (without ions) is lethal to animal cells and damaging for most proteins. Water must contain the right ions in the right amounts if it is to…

Chirality pervades multiple scientific domains-physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy-and profoundly influences their foundational principles. Recently, the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) phenomenon has captured significant…

Chirality, or the breaking of mirror symmetry, appears across all scales in nature, from molecular conformations to the dynamics of bacterial collectives. Environments composed of such symmetry-breaking constituents can give rise to…

Biological systems like ciliated microorganisms are capable to respond to the external chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis which has been studied here using the chiral squirmer model. This theoretical model considers the…

We present a comprehensive review of recent developments in the field of chiral plasmonics. Significant advances have been made recently in understanding the working principles of chiral plasmonic structures. With advances in micro- and…

The spontaneous emergence of chirality in crystalline solids has profound implications for electronic, optical, and topological properties, making the control of chiral phases a central challenge in materials design. Here, we investigate…

Many microswimmers are inherently chiral, and this chirality can introduce fascinating behaviors in a collection of microswimmers. The dynamics become even more intriguing when two types of microswimmers with distinct chirality are mixed.…

Active phase separations evade canonical thermodynamic descriptions and have thus challenged our understanding of coexistence and interfacial phenomena. Considerable progress has been made towards a non-equilibrium theoretical description…

Molecular chirality has traditionally been viewed as a binary property where a molecule is classified as either chiral or achiral, yet in the recent decades mathematical methods for quantifying chirality have been explored. Here we use toy…

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…

Homochirality, i.e. the dominance across all living matter of one enantiomer over the other among chiral molecules, is thought to be a key step in the emergence of life. Building on ideas put forward by Frank and many others, we proposed…

We report that the classical phenomena of optical activity and circular dichroism, which are traditionally associated with chirality (helicity) of organic molecules, proteins and inorganic structures, can be observed in non-chiral…

Structural chirality can induce counter-intuitive optical forces due to inherent symmetry properties. While optical forces on a single chiral particle in the Rayleigh regime have been well studied, optical forces in coupled chiral particles…

This review focuses on the chirality observed in the excited states of the magnetic order, dielectrics, and conductors that hold transverse spins when they are evanescent. Even without any relativistic effect, the transverse spin of the…