Paper by Alessandro Soncini in Physical Review Letters

Congratulations to Alessandro Soncini and Simone Calvello…

Congratulations to Alessandro Soncini and Simone Calvello for the publication of their paper in PRL on the topic "Room Temperature Chiral Discrimination in Paramagnetic NMR Spectroscopy" see Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 163001 (2016), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.163001

Despite its central role in biological processes and in a wide range of chemical reactions, chirality, the property of molecules lacking improper symmetry elements to be distinguishable from their mirror image (or enantiomer) remains a challenging property to detect and quantify. Here we present a theory predicting that in an NMR experiment, normally blind to chirality, the two mirror images of a chiral paramagnetic molecule are subject to opposite electric forces (green arrows in the picture) triggering distinguishable rotational motions for the two enantiomers in solution. If the molecules have strong magnetic anisotropy (anisotropy axes are represented as red rods in the picture), they will be partially oriented along the NMR magnetic field (blue arrows in the picture), which makes the predicted chiral electric forces large enough to be detected at room temperature, offering a way to achieve direct chiral discrimination via NMR spectroscopy.