Parity Violation in Chiral Molecules

Abstract

The current status of the computational approach to electroweak quantum chemistry which includes the parity violating weak nuclear interaction is briefly reviewed. After a short introduction and discussion of current experimental efforts in measuring parity violation in chiral molecules, the general theoretical background and recent approaches predicting order of magnitude increases in parity violating potentials are outlined. The current results on these increased values, the role of biomolecular chirality, calculation of properties, use of density functional theory, anharmonic vibrational and relativistic corrections, as well as a new isotope effect for isotopically chiral molecules are summarized.

Keywords

• Biomolecular homochirality
• Chiral molecules
• Density functional theory
• Electroweak quantum chemistry
• Isotope effects
• Parity violation