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Updated: Sep 10, 2025

Coulomb Explosion Imaging as a Tool to Distinguish Between Stereoisomers
Published on: August 18, 2017
Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in a single crystal
Ryusei Oketani1, Musashi Okada1, Kentaro Takaji2
1Division of Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka 1-3 Machikaneyama Toyonaka Osaka 560-8531 Japan r.oketani.es@osaka-u.ac.jp i.hisaki.es@osaka-u.ac.jp.
None:
Chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) under nonequilibrium open conditions is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the universe, whereas molecular-level CSB is limited. Only the preferential enrichment and Viedma ripening that occur during the crystallization process from a solution are known. Herein, we discovered the third category of CSB, which is complete CSB within a single crystal. A racemic crystal of 3-(4-(benzo[d]thiazol-2-yl)phenyl)-10-propyl-10H-phenothiazine, a phenothiazine derivative with dynamic chirality, undergoes a single-crystal-to-single-crystal structural transition to a chiral crystal. Furthermore, the chirality after the transition is able to be controlled by solid-seeding of a chiral crystal. The resulting chiral single crystals exhibited circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) properties (g lum = 8.9 × 10-4). This discovery provides a simple model of CSB and stimuli-responsive materials involving the CSB phenomenon.
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