Aim of confernce

Chirality is central to the building blocks of life: amino acids and sugars. Such chiral molecules exist in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands. Already Louis Pasteur discovered that a crystalline deposit found in wine barrels during fermentation consisted of equal amounts of left- and right-handed crystals. Chiral molecules can form either racemic (heterochiral) crystals, which contain equal numbers of left- and right-handed molecules in the same crystal, or - like in Pasteur's case - conglomerates of separate left- or right- handed (homochiral) crystals. Even today - more than 150 years after Pasteur's discovery it is not understood why chiral compounds sometimes crystallize into conglomerates or into racemic crystals. In order to better understand the complex phenomenon of stereorecognition among chiral molecules, new physical approaches based on modern techniques are applied that go beyond classical chemistry. Moreover, new materials systems are created nowadays that show novel physical phenomena based on chirality, like electron spin filtering, molecular machines, spin spirals in magnetic materials of transport phenomena.

The aim of this highly interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researches from different fields dealing with molecular chirality and chiral phenomena in the physical sciences. Aim of Chirality@The Nanoscale is to unite experts from different fields in order to address the new complex phenomena dealing with chirality which cannot be successfully unraveled by researchers from a single realm.