Most biomolecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other. However, life is homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism behind this fundamental asymmetry of life remains an open problem. Coupling the spatiotemporal evolution of a general autocatalytic polymerization reaction network to external environmental effects, we show through a detailed statistical analysis that high intensity and long duration events may drive achiral initial conditions towards chirality. We argue that life's homochirality resulted from sequential chiral symmetry breaking triggered by environmental events, thus extending the theory of punctuated equilibrium to the prebiotic realm. Applying our arguments to other potentially life-bearing planetary platforms, we predict that a statistically representative sampling will be racemic on average.

Abstract. The development of prebiotic homochirality on early-Earth or another planetary platform may be viewed as a critical phenomenon. It is shown, in the context of spatio-temporal polymerization reaction networks, that environmental effects -be them temperature surges or other external disruptions -may destroy any net chirality previously produced. In order to understand the emergence of prebiotic homochirality it is important to model the coupling of polymerization reaction networks to different planetary environments.

We investigate the properties of Q-balls in d spatial dimensions. First, a generalized virial relation for these objects is obtained. We then focus on potentials V (φφ † ) = 3 n=1 an(φφ † ) n , where an is a constant and n is an integer, obtaining variational estimates for their energies for arbitrary charge Q. These analytical estimates are contrasted with numerical results and their accuracy evaluated. Based on the results, we offer a simple criterion to classify "large" and "small" d-dimensional Qballs for this class of potentials. A minimum charge is then computed and its dependence on spatial dimensionality is shown to scale as Qmin ∼ exp(d). We also briefly investigate the existence of Q-clouds in d dimensions.

We show that the low-momentum scattering of vortex-antivortex pairs can lead to very long-lived oscillon states in 2d Abelian Higgs models. The emergence of oscillons is controlled by the ratio of scalar and vector field masses, β = (ms/mv) 2 and can be described as a phase transition in field configuration space with critical value βc ≃ 0.13(6)±2: only models with β < βc lead to oscillon-like remnants. The critical behavior of the system obeys a power law O(β) ∼ |β − βc| o , where O is an order parameter indicating the presence of oscillons and o = 0.2(2) ± 2 is the critical exponent.

We investigate the role of nonperturbative, bubble-like inhomogeneities on the decay rate of falsevacuum states in two and three-dimensional scalar field theories. The inhomogeneities are induced by setting up large-amplitude oscillations of the field about the false vacuum as, for example, after a rapid quench or in certain models of cosmological inflation. We show that, for a wide range of parameters, the presence of large-amplitude bubble-like inhomogeneities greatly accelerates the decay rate, changing it from the well-known exponential suppression of homogeneous nucleation to a power-law suppression. It is argued that this fast, power-law vacuum decay -known as resonant nucleation -is promoted by the presence of long-lived oscillons among the nonperturbative fluctuations about the false vacuum. A phase diagram is obtained distinguishing three possible mechanisms for vacuum decay: homogeneous nucleation, resonant nucleation, and cross-over. Possible applications are briefly discussed.