<i>Colloquium</i>: Homochirality: Symmetry breaking in systems driven far from equilibrium

Saitō, Yukio; Hyuga, Hiroyuki

doi:10.1103/revmodphys.85.603

Cited by 108 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 105 publications

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“…Well-known examples include spontaneous magnetization 3 , the symmetry breaking in strong interaction that is responsible for the bulk of mass of nucleons 4,5 , the recently discovered Higgs boson [6][7][8][9][10] and the breaking of chiral symmetry in biochemistry that is crucially important for the homochirality of biomolecules [11][12][13] . Recent studies of spontaneous symmetry breaking in nonlinear optical systems [14][15][16] and Bose-Einstein condensates 17,18 further underline its ubiquity.…”

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confidence: 99%

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in metamaterials

et al. 2014

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Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking underpins a variety of areas such as subatomic physics and biochemistry, and leads to an impressive range of fundamental phenomena. Here we show that this prominent effect is now available in artificial electromagnetic systems, enabled by the advent of magnetoelastic metamaterials where a mechanical degree of freedom leads to a rich variety of strong nonlinear effects such as bistability and self-oscillations. We report spontaneous symmetry breaking in torsional chiral magnetoelastic structures where two or more meta-molecules with opposite handedness are electromagnetically coupled, modifying the system stability. Importantly, we show that chiral symmetry breaking can be found in the stationary response of the system, and the effect is successfully demonstrated in a microwave pump-probe experiment. Such symmetry breaking can lead to a giant nonlinear polarization change, energy localization and mode splitting, which provides a new possibility for creating an artificial phase transition in metamaterials, analogous to that in ferrimagnetic domains.

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confidence: 99%

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in metamaterials

et al. 2014

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“…There have been many other models of homochirality since Frank's model, but the underlying mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking in all of these models is the same as the mechanism by Frank [15]. Frank's model is reviewed in detail in Sec.…”

Section: B Biological Homochirality: a Symmetry-breaking Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The main focus of this work is on spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanisms. All of the previous spontaneous symmetry-breaking models of homochirality have the same basic mechanism [15] as Frank's model [8], which is reviewed in Sec. I C. Frank has shown that in a population of self-replicating (autocatalytic) chiral molecules that are mutually antagonistic, the racemic solution is unstable.…”

Section: Introduction To Homochiralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frank's, in which there is a kinetic instability of a racemic (50% right handed and 50% left handed) mixture of chiral molecules produced by certain autocatalytic reactions [8]. The theory additionally invokes a mutually antagonistic relationship between the two enantiomers of the chiral molecule, known as "chiral inhibition", and has led to a large literature of specific realizations for Frank's spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanism [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Although autocatalysis is an expected prerequisite for early life selfreplicators, the mutually antagonistic relationship between the two chiral molecules does not seem to be biologically necessary [16] and might in principle depend on when we place the origin of homochirality with respect to the origin of life [17].…”

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Noise-induced symmetry breaking far from equilibrium and the emergence of biological homochirality

Jafarpour

Biancalani

Goldenfeld³

2017

Phys. Rev. E

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The origin of homochirality, the observed single-handedness of biological amino acids and sugars, has long been attributed to autocatalysis, a frequently assumed precursor for early life self-replication. However, the stability of homochiral states in deterministic autocatalytic systems relies on cross-inhibition of the two chiral states, an unlikely scenario for early life self-replicators. Here we present a theory for a stochastic individual-level model of autocatalytic prebiotic self-replicators that are maintained out of thermal equilibrium. Without chiral inhibition, the racemic state is the global attractor of the deterministic dynamics, but intrinsic multiplicative noise stabilizes the homochiral states. Moreover, we show that this noise-induced bistability is robust with respect to diffusion of molecules of opposite chirality, and systems of diffusively coupled autocatalytic chemical reactions synchronize their final homochiral states when the self-replication is the dominant production mechanism for the chiral molecules. We conclude that nonequilibrium autocatalysis is a viable mechanism for homochirality, without imposing additional nonlinearities such as chiral inhibition. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.032407 Homochirality, the single-handedness of all biological amino acids and sugars, is one of two major universal features of life on Earth. The other is the canonical genetic code. Their universality transcends all categories of life, up to and including the three domains, and thus requires an explanation that transcends the idiosyncrasies of individual organisms and particular environments. The only universal process common to all life is, of course, evolution, and so it is natural to seek an explanation for biological homochirality in these terms, just as has been done to account for the universality and error-minimization aspects of the genetic code [1]. This paper is just such an attempt, using the simplest and most general commonly accepted attributes of living systems.The origin of biological homochirality has been one of the most debated topics since its discovery by Louis Pasteur in 1848 [2]. There are those who argue that homochirality must have preceded the first chemical systems undergoing Darwinian evolution, and there are those who believe homochirality is a consequence of life, but not a prerequisite [3]. There are even those who argue that homochirality is a consequence of underlying asymmetries from the laws of physics, invoking complicated astrophysical scenarios for the origin of chiral organic molecules [4] or even the violation of parity from the weak interactions [5,6]! In fact, explanations that are based on physical asymmetries can only predict an enantiomeric excess of one handedness over another, and not the 100% effect observed in nature [7]. * Corresponding author: fjafarpo@purdue.eduThe most influential class of theories for biological homochirality rest on an idea of F.C. Frank's, in which there is a kinetic instability of a racemic (50% right handed and 50% left handed) mi...

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“…the property by which a pattern cannot be superimposed with its mirror image [1], is a basic characteristic of structured matter at all scales, from the cosmological to the molecular. It enters fundamental questions, such as the homochirality observed in life [2] and the parity violation within the Standard Model of physics [3,4]. An ubiquitous manifestation of chirality is optical activity, an optical effect characterized by the rotation of the polarization plane of linearly polarized light propagating through a chiral medium, and preferential absorption of circularly polarized light of a particular handedness (circular dichroism) if the medium is dissipative.…”

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confidence: 99%

Toroidal circular dichroism

et al. 2016

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Optical activity is ubiquitous across natural and artificial media and is conventionally understood in terms of scattering from electric and magnetic moments. Here we demonstrate experimentally and confirm numerically a type of optical activity that cannot be attributed to electric and magnetic multipoles. We show that our observations can only be accounted for by the inclusion of the toroidal dipole moment, the first term of the recently established peculiar family of toroidal multipoles.Chirality, i.e. the property by which a pattern cannot be superimposed with its mirror image [1], is a basic characteristic of structured matter at all scales, from the cosmological to the molecular. It enters fundamental questions, such as the homochirality observed in life [2] and the parity violation within the Standard Model of physics [3,4]. An ubiquitous manifestation of chirality is optical activity, an optical effect characterized by the rotation of the polarization plane of linearly polarized light propagating through a chiral medium, and preferential absorption of circularly polarized light of a particular handedness (circular dichroism) if the medium is dissipative. Observed more than 150 years ago by Louis Pasteur on solutions of tartaric acid [5], optical activity occupies a central position in the diagnostic methodology of many scientific disciplines [6], where it provides means of obtaining information about the microscopic structure and electromagnetic excitations of a medium from its far-field scattering properties. An examination of optical activity is invaluable, for example, in the biosciences where it enables deduction of the conformation of proteins in a dynamic fashion [7], or in the study of magnetic phenomena in strongly correlated electronic systems [8].Optical activity is typically described within the dipole approximation of the dynamic multipole expansion [6], where the interaction of an incident wave with collinear electric and magnetic dipoles induced in the medium affects the polarization state of the wave upon transmission. Certain combinations of electric dipole and other higher-order multipoles (most notably electrical quadrupole) can also contribute to optical activity [9,10], although such contributions are usually considered negligible, especially in isotropic media [11,12]. It was suggested recently [13] that optical activity could arise even in the absence of electric dipolar response due to the excitation of toroidal multipoles, an elusive part of the dynamic multipole response [14,15]. In particular, it was anticipated that toroidal dipole should contribute to optical activity in the same manner as electric dipole [13] since the two have the same angular momentum and parity properties [14,16].In this Letter we observe experimentally and confirm numerically that the toroidal dipolar excitation can in fact provide the dominant contribution to optical activity, assuming the role of the electric dipole. Using the metamaterial approach, we have been able to enhance in a resonant fashion the ...

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Colloquium: Homochirality: Symmetry breaking in systems driven far from equilibrium

Cited by 108 publications

References 105 publications

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in metamaterials

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in metamaterials

Noise-induced symmetry breaking far from equilibrium and the emergence of biological homochirality

Toroidal circular dichroism

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