Parity Violation in Chiral Molecules: From Theory towards Spectroscopic Experiment and the Evolution of Biomolecular Homochirality

Abstract

The discovery of parity violation led to one of the most striking developments of physics in the 20 century and is a major pillar of the current fundamental theory of high energy physics (the standard model of particle physics, SMPP). For molecular stereochemistry it leads to the surprising prediction of a small energy difference pv 0 Δ E of the ground state energies of the enantiomers of chiral molecules, corresponding to a small reaction enthalpy for the stereomutation between the R and S enantiomers [6].