A geometric figure has chirality, or handedness, if its mirror image cannot be brought to coincide with itself. The concept of chirality was instrumental in establishing the tetrahedral valences of the carbon atom, and has continued to play a key role in chemistry and molecular biology ever since.
The fact that living organisms use only one of two mirror isomers of such molecules as amino acids and sugars, that is, the question of the origin of homochirality of the molecular basis of life, remains an unsolved problem of the same dignity as the origin of dark matter and dark energy.
The increasing importance of chirality and topology in condensed matter physics and chemistry, and the production of new states of matter in heavy-ion collisions, have brought the concept of chirality into physics and cosmology in a tangible way while at the same time expanded the physics/chemistry interface. The book is the first to address all aspects of chirality in a single volume.
Sample Chapter(s)
Preface
Chirality: A Scientific Leitmotif
Contents:
- Chirality: A Scientific Leitmotif (Frank Wilczek)
- Chirality in Astrophysics (Axel Brandenburg)
- Using Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions to Search for the Chiral Magnetic Effect and Local Parity Violation (Helen Caines)
- Chiral Magnetic Effect in Heavy Ion Collisions and Beyond (Dmitri E Kharzeev)
- Nonperturbative Casimir Effects: Vacuum Structure, Confinement, and Chiral Symmetry Breaking (A V Molochkov)
- Emergent Electromagnetic Phenomena in Spin Chiral Matter (Yoshinori Tokura)
- Dynamics of Chiral Fermions in Condensed Matter Systems (Qiang Li)
- The Chiral Anomaly in Dirac and Weyl Semimetals (N Phuan Ong)
- Chiral "Graviton" and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect (Dung Xuan Nguyen and Dam Thanh Son)
- Topology and Chirality (C Felser and J Gooth)
- Asymmetric Autocatalysis and the Elucidation of the Origin of Homochirality (Kenso Soai)
- On Chirality, Symmetry, Entropy and Isotopes (R A Zubarev)
- The Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity Effect (R Naaman)
- Ultrafast Chiral Dynamics and Geometric Fields in Chiral Molecules (Olga Smirnova)
- High Sensitivity Chiral Detection in the Gas Phase via Microwave Spectroscopy and the Possible Frontier of Ultracold Chiral Molecules (John M Doyle, Zack D Lasner and Benjamin L Augenbraun)
- Parity Violation in Chiral Molecules: From Theory towards Spectroscopic Experiment and the Evolution of Biomolecular Homochirality (M Quack, G Seyfang and G Wichmann)
Readership: Researchers across all physics domains, as well as interdisciplinary fields at the interface of chemistry, biology and physics.
Egor Babaev is Professor of Physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Among his scientific achievements is the development of theories of superconducting and superfluid phenomena in multicomponent systems, including the proposal of the mechanism of formation of fermion quadrupling condensates and type-1.5 superconductivity.
Dmitri Kharzeev is Distinguished Professor of Physics and Director of Center for Nuclear Theory at Stony Brook University and Senior Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Among his scientific achievements are the discovery of the chiral magnetic effect, contributions to the understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics at high energy, and development of the connections between quantum information and high energy physics. He has been a Managing Editor of the International Journal of Modern Physics E (Nuclear Physics) since 1999.
Mats Larsson is Professor of Physics at Stockholm University, member elect of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, and foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He pioneered the study of recombination processes between cold molecular ions and low-energy electrons in ion storage rings and applied those studies to make progress in molecular astrophysics. His present interest is in chiral molecules and their studies by means of ion storage rings and free electron lasers.
Alexander Molochkov is the founder and head of the Pacific Quantum Center in Vladivostok and a Visiting Professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Alexander Molochkov has extensive experience in investigating the vacuum gauge theory and topological objects on lattices. In particular, together with his collaborators, he has performed on supercomputers a series of successful simulations of chiral structures in external fields in the framework of gauge field theory with the SU(2) symmetry group. For the first time, they confirmed the existence of the axial magnetic effect and, indirectly, of the chiral vortical effect using first-principle lattice simulations. They also discovered several non-trivial vacuum structure effects in bounded spaces with Casimir boundaries. In particular, he discovered early chiral phase transitions in gauge theories and new mass-scale in non-Abelian theory. In his early works, he also predicted that changes in nucleon structure of a nucleus (EMC-effect) result from nucleon-bound states' time-boundaries.
Vitali Zhaunerchyk is an associate professor at the Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg. His research area is high-resolution spectroscopy of gas-phase bio-molecules. He is a holder of several project grants from the Swedish Research Council.