On the role of true and false chirality in producing parity violating energy differences

TL;DR

This paper investigates how true and false chirality influences can cause parity-violating energy differences, demonstrating that only truly chiral influences like the electroweak interaction can lift degeneracy between enantiomers.

Contribution

It provides a quantum field theoretical analysis showing that only truly chiral influences can produce parity-violating energy differences in chiral systems.

Findings

Only truly chiral influences like the Z0-mediated interaction can lift enantiomer degeneracy.

Falsely chiral influences, such as axion-mediated interactions, cannot produce parity violation.

Extends Barron's ideas using a quantum field theory approach.

Abstract

In this work we tackle the problem of showing which type of influences can lift the degeneracy between truly and falsely chiral systems, showing that only when both systems and influences are both truly (falsely) chiral, a parity violating energy difference between left- and right-handed systems can be produced. In particular, after considering the enantiomers of a chiral molecule as paradigmatic truly chiral systems, we rigorously show, under a quantum field theoretically approach, that only a truly chiral influence such as the $Z^{0}$-mediated electroweak interaction can lift the degeneracy between enantiomers. On the contrary, we explicitly show that a falsely chiral influence, such as an axion-mediated interaction in chiral molecules, can not lift the aforementioned degeneracy. These results extend Barron's seminal ideas [L. D. Barron, True and false chirality and parity violation, Chem. Phys. Lett {\bf 123}, 423 (1986)] to a quantum field theory-based approach.