Parity Violation Dominates the Dynamics of Chirality in Dichlorodisulfane

Meaninglessly small would be the effects from parity violation according to the traditional point of view on the structure and dynamics of chiral molecules; enantiomers would thus exist as symmetry-related structures, which are de facto stable because of very long tunneling times. With ClSSCl as the first example, electroweak and tunneling dynamics calculations demonstrate that the de lege asymmetry arising from the parity-violating energy difference ΔE_pv between the two enantiomers ((P)- and (M)-ClSSCl, the figure shows the torsional potentials) dominates by far over the tunneling splitting in the symmetrical case. These results are of fundamental interest for our concept of molecular chirality.