Chiral molecules presence

Only reaction 1 provides a direct pathway to this chiral molecule the intermediate 2-methyl-butanal may be silylated and reacted with formaldehyde in the presence of the boronated tartaric ester described on page 61. The enantiomeric excess may, however, be low. 

Chiral (Section 9.2) Having handedness. Chiral molecules are those that do not have a plane of symmetry and are therefore not superimposable on their mirror image. A chiral molecule thus exists in two forms, one right-handed and one left-handed. The most common cause of chirality in a molecule is the presence of a carbon atom that is bonded to four different substituents. 

The structures of phases such as the chiral nematic, the blue phases and the twist grain boundary phases are known to result from the presence of chiral interactions between the constituent molecules [3]. It should be possible, therefore, to explore the properties of such phases with computer simulations by introducing chirality into the pair potential and this can be achieved in two quite different ways. In one a point chiral interaction is added to the Gay-Berne potential in essentially the same manner as electrostatic interactions have been included (see Sect. 7). In the other, quite different approach a chiral molecule is created by linking together two or more Gay-Berne particles as in the formation of biaxial molecules (see Sect. 10). Here we shall consider the phases formed by chiral Gay-Berne systems produced using both strategies. 

The presence of a single tetrahedral stereocenter => chiral molecule. 

As mentioned in Section 1.2, the presence of an asymmetric carbon is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for optical activity. Each enantiomer of a chiral molecule rotates the plane of polarized light to an equal degree but in opposite directions. A chiral compound is optically active only if the amount of one enantiomer is in excess of the other. Measuring the enantiomer composition is very important in asymmetric synthesis, as chemists working in this area need the information to evaluate the asymmetric induction efficiency of asymmetric reactions. 

FIGURE 4.18 Comportment of enantiomers in the presence of another chiral molecule. Only one enantiomer reacts with an enzyme. Enantiomers associate differently with another chiral molecule. 

Recent experimental and theoretical studies on crystal growth, especially in the presence of tailor-made inhibitors, provide a link between macroscopic and microscopic chirality. We shall discuss these principles in some detail for chiral molecules. Furthermore, we shall examine whether it is indeed feasible today to establish the absolute configuration of a chiral crystal from an analysis of solvent-surface interactions. Since these analyses are based on understanding the interactions between a growing crystal and inhibitors present in solution, we shall first illustrate the general mechanism of this effect in various chiral and nonchiral systems. 

Until now I have discussed the methods of synthesis of optically active polymers from chiral monomers. As is well known in organic chemistry, it is also possible to produce chiral molecules with one preferred configuration by reaction of achiral molecules in the presence of some chiral influence. These reactions are known as asymmetric syntheses (36, 323-325) when an unsatuiated compound is involved, the term enantioface-differenriating reaction is often used (281). 

During classical asymmetric synthesis, the amplitude of these fluctuations are expected to decrease during the course of the reaction because more and more chiral molecules are formed and eeeXp declines. However, in the presence of chiral autocatalysis, the small ee caused by such fluctuations can be amplified. In such cases, the system is likely to be most sensitive in the initial stage of reaction when the concentration of chiral molecules is still small. If the autocatalytic species are concentrated they can be either in a racemic or optically active state but if they are highly diluted, as at the beginning of the reaction, statistical fluctuations can become significant so that the state... 

A similar effect has been reported in the crystallization of non-chiral molecules, where the presence of small amounts of chiral additive forces the entire system to crystallize in an enantiomorphous crystal, which upon further solid-state reaction can be converted into polymers of a single handedness [184,185]. Chiral auxiliaries, which affect crystal nucleation enantios-electively, have been successfully used for the large-scale optical resolution of enantiomers [186-188]. 

Chiral The presence of asymmetry in a molecule giving rise to isomers. 

Consider then a chiral molecule with Hamiltonian HM, in the presence of a series of laser pulses. (In general we may deal with lasers that are not fully coherent, but for simplicity we focus here on transform-limited pulses of linearly polarized light.) The treatment is in accord with Chapter 1, Eq. (1.51), where the interaction between the molecule and radiation is given by... 

The feature of 2-chlorobutane that makes it chiral is the presence of a carbon attached to four different groups. Such carbons are another type of stereocenter. The currently accepted term to describe such a carbon, or any other tetrahedral atom attached to four different groups, is chirality center. (Some older terms that you may encounter are chiral carbon atom or asymmetric carbon atom.) Any molecule with one chirality center as its only stereocenter is chiral. (As we shall see shortly, many, but not all, molecules with multiple chirality centers are also chiral.) So, another way to identify a chiral molecule is to look for a single chirality center, which requires some practice. It helps to remember that any carbon that is attached to two identical groups (this includes all doubly and triply bonded carbons) is not a chirality center. Consider these examples ... 

The most common method used to detect the presence of chiral molecules in a sample employs the interaction of plane-polarized light with the sample. 

On a molecular level, describes the linear response of the electric (d) and magnetic (m) dipole moment of a single chiral molecule to the presence of time-dependent electric (E) and magnetic (B) fields. We refer the reader to the books by Kauzmann [32] and Barron [1] and the review by Condon [31] for derivations of the following equations for the field-induced dipole moments ... 

Ordinary STIRAP is only sensitive to the energy levels and the magnitudes of transition-dipole coupling matrix elements between them. These quantities are identical for enantiomers. Its insensitivity to the phase of the transition-dipole matrix elements renders STIRAP incapable of selecting between enantiomers. Recently we have demonstrated [11] that precisely the lack of inversion center, which characterizes chiral molecules, allows us to combine the weak-field one-and two-photon interference control method [29,54,95,96] with, the strong-field STIRAP to render a phase-sensitive AP method. In this method, which we termed cyclic population transfer (CPT), one forms a STIRAP loop by supplementing the usual STIRAP 1) o 2) <=> 3) two-photon process by a one-photon process 1) <=> 3). The lack of inversion center is essentrat, because one-photon and two-photon processes cannot connect the same states in the presence of an inversion center, where all states have a well defined parity, because a one-photon absorption (or emission) between states 1) and 3) requires that these states have opposite parities, whereas a two-photon process requires that these states have the same parity. 

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