Symmetry and Chirality: Where Physics Shakes Hands with Chemistry and Biology

In reflecting the author's personal perspective, this review demonstrates how chirality is a unifying theme in modern science. Using the discrete symmetries of parity P, time reversal T and charge conjugation C to characterize chiral systems, the concepts of true and false chirality that emerge provide an extension of Lord Kelvin's definition to dynamic situations This clarifies the nature of physical influences able to induce absolute enantioselection, emphasizing the distinct behaviour of processes under thermodynamic and kinetic control. Parity violation and CP violation are suggested to be manifestations of true and false cosmic chirality, respectively, with possible roles in abiotic enantioselection. Truly chiral systems support time-even pseudoscalar observables which endows chiroptical spectroscopies with a special sensitivity to absolute stereochemistry, exemplified by the application of vibrational Raman optical activity to small chiral organic molecules and intact viruses.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Israel Journal of Chemistry

• Publication date

  2021-08-12

• Fields of study

  Physics, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/ijch.202100044
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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