Louis Pasteur first discovered that molecules have a “handedness” in 1848 while he was studying salts of acids that had been separated and dried from the bottom of old wine casks. Some 45 years later, Lord Kelvin introduced the term “chirality” to describe a geometric shape that looks different from its mirror image. Many biomolecules are also chiral – humans are made from proteins containing amino acids that are coded only for “right-handed” DNA.
Now a team of nuclear physicists in the US, led by Krzysztof Starosta of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has found the first evidence for the chirality of atomic nuclei (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2001 86 971).
Pasteur may have discovered chirality over 150 years ago, but Rod Clark of the Nuclear Science Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA explains in the April issue of Physics World why we will hear much about it in the future.
