Transition Radiation as a Probe of the Chiral Anomaly

Irradiation of a spin-active nucleus causes an increase or decrease in the signal intensity of neighboring nuclei that are not necessarily chemically bonded or involved in J-coupling. This phenomenon, called the nuclear Overhauser enhancement (NOE), results from through-space interactions between the nuclear spins. The NOE effect decreases with increasing internuclear distance and is generally not observed beyond 4 angstroms. In NOE, dipole-dipole interactions between neighboring spin-active...

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 axial and equatorial protons in cyclohexane can be distinguished by performing a variable-temperature NMR experiment. In this process, except for one proton, the remaining eleven protons are replaced by deuterium. The deuterium substitution avoids the possible peak splitting caused by the spin-spin coupling between the adjacent protons. The remaining proton flips between the axial and equatorial positions.

At room temperature, the chair conformer of cyclohexane undergoes rapid ring flipping between two equivalent chair conformers at a rate of approximately 105 times per second. These two chair conformers are in equilibrium. The rapid ring flipping results in the interconversion of the axial proton to an equatorial proton and an equatorial to the axial proton. Such interconversions are too rapid and cannot be detected on the NMR timescale. Hence, the NMR spectrometer cannot distinguish between the...

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...

Stereochemistry is the study of the different spatial arrangements of atoms in a given molecule. The stereochemistry of radical halogenations can be understood from three different situations:
Halogenation to form a new chiral center: