Lombardi Andrea, Palazzetti Federico
Dipartimento di Chimica, Biologia e Biotecnologie, Università di Perugia, Via Elce di Sotto 8, 06123, Perugia, Italy. Consortium for Computational Molecular and Materials Sciences (CMS)2, Via Elce di Sotto, 8, 06123 Perugia, Italy.
J Phys Condens Matter. 2018 Feb 14;30(6):063003. doi: 10.1088/1361-648X/aaa1c8.
Chirality is a phenomenon that permeates the natural world, with implications for atomic and molecular physics, for fundamental forces and for the mechanisms at the origin of the early evolution of life and biomolecular homochirality. The manifestations of chirality in chemistry and biochemistry are numerous, the striking ones being chiral recognition and asymmetric synthesis with important applications in molecular sciences and in industrial and pharmaceutical chemistry. Chiral discrimination phenomena, due to the existence of two enantiomeric forms, very well known in the case of interaction with light, but still nearly disregarded in molecular collision studies. Here we review some ideas and recent advances about the role of chirality in molecular collisions, designing and illustrating molecular beam experiments for the demonstration of chiral effects and suggesting a scenario for a stereo-directional origin of chiral selection.
