Chirality: From Weak Bosons to the α-Helix

Description

The phenomenon of chirality occurs in many disciplines of natural sciences, such as elementary particle physics, chemistry of molecules, biopolymers and crystals, pharmacology, biology (snails, winding plants), and medicine (handedness). Review articles are widely available for most of these fields and written for the respective experts. This book gives for the first time an interdisciplinary comprehensive treatment of chirality. Ten well-known scientists describe the present state of the art in different fields in introductory review articles without going into detail. Most importantly, the book is more than an accumulation of different chapters insofar as biomolecular homochirality is traced back to the chirality of elementary particles in atomic nuclei. The authors have attempted to present chemistry for physicists and physics for chemists, etc. Any scientist who is engaged in chirality may benefit from the present survey.