Key words oxonium ions - stereogenic oxygen oxepin xanthene pyramidal inversion quantum calculation

Introduction Most living things appear rather symmetrical: the external human form, for example, has a plane of mirror symmetry to good approximation. Snails, flounders, narwhals, crossbills, fiddler crabs and twining vines are members of the short but fascinating list of living things known instead to defy mirror symmetry by exhibiting exterior chirality. The study of this symmetry breaking li...

Restricted rotations of chemical bonds can lead to the presence of persistent conformational chirality in molecules lacking stereocenters. We report the development of first-of-a-kind predictive rules that enable identification of conformational chirality and prediction of racemization barriers in the diarylether heptanoid (DAEH) natural products that do not possess stereocenters. These empiric...

The total synthesis of hyacinthacine A2 is reported via a novel transannular hydroamination in which planar chirality of a 5-aza-trans-cyclooctene precursor is transferred to point chirality in the product. Key to the success of this strategy was the development of a method for establishing absolute planar chirality via stereocontrolled photoisomerization of a 5-aza-cis-cyclooctene. This was ac...

We show that the chirality of triangular antiferromagnetic clusters can be used as a qubit even if it is entirely decoupled from the total spin of the cluster. In particular, we estimate the orbital moment associated with the chirality, and we show that it can be large enough to allow a direct measurement of the chirality with a field perpendicular to the cluster. Consequences for molecular mag...

Proposal for detecting spin-chirality terms in Mott insulators via resonant inelastic x-ray scattering. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We consider...