New Scientific Finding: Light Can Be Used to Control Molecular Handedness

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin took part in a new study on chiral molecules recently published in "Science Advances". In a recent study, researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, the DESY research center in Hamburg, Kiel University, and Kansas State University have shown how light can turn a planar molecule into a chiral molecule with just one particular handedness, providing a solution to the long-standing problem of absolute asymmetric synthesis. This new process could be particularly useful in chemically synthesizing compounds. The study, which was carried out as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1319 "Extreme Light for Sensing and Driving Molecular Chirality (ELCH)," was published in the internationally renowned scientific journal Science Advances at the start of December. The article is available online here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade0311 . "Molecules that consist of four or more atoms are often chiral - which means that their atomic spatial arrangement is either left-handed or right-handed. Each chiral molecule has a twin molecule from a mirror world with the opposite handedness," explains Professor Christiane Koch from the Department of Physics at Freie Universität Berlin.