Colloquium

The Chirality of Life: A Field Theory Approach

Marcelo Gleiser
Physics Department
Dartmouth College
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Higgins 310, 4 pm

Life is chiral. Amino acids that make up biomolecules are left-handed, while all sugars are right-handed. And yet, when synthesized in the laboratory, the solutions come out 50-50. Is life's chirality simply an accident, or is it the result of dynamical processes that occurred in early Earth, during prebiotic times?  If life exists elsewhere in the Universe, will it choose the same chirality? In this talk, I will address these and other questions of interest in astrobiology,  using techniques from nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and field theory. In particular, I will argue that life's chirality might be due to a symmetry-breaking phase transition. Exploring this possibility, I will obtain bounds on possible processes that may have selected life's chirality here and possibly in other life-bearing planetary platforms.