Chirality for crooked curves
Soft Condensed Matter
2020-04-23 v1 Materials Science
Geometric Topology
Metric Geometry
Biological Physics
Abstract
Chiral objects rotate when placed in a collimated flow or wind. We exploit this hydrodynamic intuition to construct a tensorial chirality measure for rigid filaments and curves. This tensor is trace-free, so if a curve has a right-handed twist about some axis, there is a perpendicular axis about which the twist is left-handed. Our measure places minimal requirements on the smoothness of the curve, hence it can be readily used to quantify chirality for biomolecules and polymers, polygonal and rectifiable curves, and other discrete geometrical structures.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2004.10338,
title = {Chirality for crooked curves},
author = {Giovanni Dietler and Robert Kusner and Wöden Kusner and Eric Rawdon and Piotr Szymczak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.10338},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures