Raman optical activity, long thought to require chiral molecules or magnetic order, has been demonstrated in an achiral, ...

Asymmetric hydrogenation may be the current gold standard in asymmetric catalysis, but it could face competition from a new family of diphosphine ligands for hydroformylation. Collaborators from the ...

(Nanowerk News) A research team has discovered that achiral hard banana-shaped particles can spontaneously form exotic structures like skyrmions and blue phase III phases. Skyrmions are tiny ...

Whether or not an object is indistinguishable from its mirror image has important consequences for its physical behavior. Say you watch a basketball player in a mirror. The ball, the player and their ...

Circularly polarized light (CPL) plays an important role in various contemporary applications such as chiral molecule distinguishing, remote sensing, quantum optics, and spintronics. Traditional ...

Catenanes are organic compounds with ring-like molecules that are mechanically interlocked. The mechanical locking system in such molecules is so robust that they can only be disentangled via covalent ...

Diao and her colleagues observed something different. Under the right conditions, achiral conjugated polymers can depart from the norm and assemble into chiral structures. Their paper appears in ...

How the molecules of life came to adopt a particular handedness is an enduring mystery—one that chemists may never completely solve. Nicholas V. Hud and coworkers at the Georgia Institute of ...

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have found that engineered achiral (symmetric) materials, called achiral plasmonic metasurfaces, can absorb light differently depending on the handedness of the ...