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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.

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...

Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers

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Molecules that possess multiple chiral centers can afford a large number of stereoisomers. For instance, while some molecules like 2-butanol have one chiral center, defined as a tetrahedral carbon atom with four different substituents attached, several molecules like butane-2,3-diol have multiple chiral centers. A simple formula to predict the number of stereoisomers possible for a molecule with n chiral centers is 2n. However, there can be a lower number where some of the stereoisomers are...

¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons

¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons

Replacing each alpha-hydrogen in chloroethane by bromine (or a different functional group) yields a pair of enantiomers. Such protons are called prochiral or enantiotopic and are related by a mirror plane. Enantiotopic protons are chemically equivalent in an achiral environment. Because most proton NMR spectra are recorded using achiral solvents, enantiotopic hydrogens yield a single signal.
In chiral compounds such as 2-butanol, replacing the methylene hydrogens at C3 produces a pair of...

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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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Demonstration of Equal-Intensity Beam Generation by Dielectric Metasurfaces

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Strong, spectrally-tunable chirality in diffractive metasurfaces.

Israel De Leon¹, Matthew J Horton¹, Sebastian A Schulz¹

¹Department of Physics and Max Planck Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada.

Scientific Reports

|September 5, 2015

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Metasurfaces can enhance light manipulation using near-field diffraction. This research demonstrates tunable, ultra-thin spectral filters with spin-controlled functionality for advanced photonic devices.

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Area of Science:

Optics and Photonics
Materials Science
Nanotechnology

Background:

Metamaterials and metasurfaces offer advanced light manipulation capabilities.
Recent studies show significantly enhanced chiral responses compared to natural materials.

Purpose of the Study:

To theoretically and experimentally demonstrate enhanced extrinsic chiral response in metasurfaces.
To explore the role of near-field diffraction and lattice plasmon modes.
To develop tunable, ultra-thin spectral filters with polarization sensitivity.

Main Methods:

Theoretical modeling of metasurface electromagnetic response.
Experimental fabrication and characterization of chiral metasurfaces.
Investigation of near-field diffraction effects and lattice plasmon excitation.
Analysis of circular dichroism spectra and tunability with illumination angle.

Main Results:

Demonstrated dramatic enhancement of extrinsic chiral response via near-field diffraction.
Identified lattice plasmon modes selective to polarization handedness.
Observed sharp, angle-tunable circular dichroism spectra.
Developed an ultra-thin spectral filter with ~10 nm linewidth, tunable over 200 nm.

Conclusions:

Near-field diffraction significantly boosts metasurface chiral responses.
Chiral diffractive metasurfaces enable novel ultra-thin photonic devices.
Tunable, spin-controlled spectral filters are achievable with this approach.