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Chirality in Nature

Chirality in Nature

Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid. The...

Chirality

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...

Prochirality

Prochirality

The concept of prochirality leads to the nomenclature of the individual faces of a molecule and plays a crucial role in the enantioselective reaction. It is a concept where two or more achiral molecules react to produce chiral products. A typical process is the reaction of an achiral ketone to generate a chiral alcohol. Here, the achiral reactant reacts with an achiral reducing agent, sodium borohydride, to generate an equimolar mixture of the chiral enantiomers of the product. For example, an...

Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur

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Chirality is most prevalent in carbon-based tetrahedral compounds, but this important facet of molecular symmetry extends to sp3-hybridized nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur centers, including trivalent molecules with lone pairs. Here, the lone pair behaves as a functional group in addition to the other three substituents to form an analogous tetrahedral center that can be chiral.
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...

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Related Experiment Video

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Facet-to-facet Linking of Shape-anisotropic Colloidal Cadmium Chalcogenide Nanostructures

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Published on: August 10, 2017

Periodic nanostructures: spatial dispersion mimics chirality.

Bruno Gompf¹, Julia Braun, Thomas Weiss

¹Physikalisches Institut and Research Center SCOPE, Universität Stuttgart, Germany.

Physical Review Letters

|June 4, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

We observed significant polarization rotation in subwavelength nanostructures, exceeding that of chiral molecules. This effect arises from spatial dispersion, not magnetic interactions, offering new possibilities for optical devices.

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Area of Science:

Nanophotonics
Plasmonics
Optical Metamaterials

Background:

Chirality typically causes polarization rotation in materials due to their handedness.
This phenomenon is crucial for applications in optical devices and sensors.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate polarization rotation in subwavelength nanostructures at oblique incidence.
To explore the underlying physics and compare it with conventional optical activity.

Main Methods:

Mueller-matrix spectroscopic ellipsometry was used to map the complete k-space.
Optical response of a subwavelength square array of holes was analyzed in visible and near-IR regions.

Main Results:

Observed significant polarization rotation in the visible and near-IR regions.
Rotary power was found to be orders of magnitude larger than that of chiral molecules in specific directions.
The effect was attributed to spatial dispersion, distinct from magnetic interactions.

Conclusions:

Subwavelength nanostructures can exhibit strong polarization rotation due to spatial dispersion.
This finding offers a new mechanism for polarization control in optical systems.
The study highlights the fundamental differences between nanostructure-induced and molecular chirality effects.