Breaking the chiral mirror of alanine with dipole moment and oriented electric field: Violations of parity degeneracy and a possible answer to nature’s homochirality

Abstract

Life is chiral and chirality of life is single-handedness. While ubiquity of homochirality is the signature of nature, its’ origin is still existing as a question of unresolved mysteries. All the earlier hypotheses on homochirality advocate for weak nuclear forces responsible for the chiral parity degeneracy breaking. This work shows that an electronic discriminator like, component of dipole moment can break the chiral mirror of alanine more effectively than the weak nuclear forces. Using a theoretical approach, synchronization of enantio-discriminating dipole component of alanine, with the applied field orientation, was used to break the chiral mirror, first time for a chiral amino-acid. This technique was found to activate simultaneously both thermodynamic and kinetic controls, in a manner complaisant to one another, to achieve ≈100% ee for l-alanine (reversed field: d-alanine). We argue that nature’s choice of bio-homochirality, may be not only due to weak nuclear forces, as electronic parity violations were found to be profound and efficient.