Ricerc@Sapienza

Macroscopic and microscopic dissymmetry plays a key role in life sciences. The unknown origin of homochirality in terrestrial life and the high enantioselectivity of processes involving chiral molecules of biological relevance are among the most intriguing questions in natural phenomena and chiral technologies to be answered. Perhaps, the most fascinating unsolved mystery is the origin of life on our planet. One of the viable hypothesis is the extraterrestrial uptake of biological material through meteorites. This is clearly supported by the discovery of organic content made of chiral amino acids (the building blocks of life) exhibiting enantiomeric excess (e.e.) of the same form (L) of the terrestrial protein amino acids (the Murchinson meteorite fell in Australia in 1969).
In the context of the abiotic generation of e.e. in meteoritic material, studying mechanisms potentially responsible for such a generation becomes crucially important, such as, for instance, the interaction between racemic samples of chiral molecules (balanced mixture of enantiomeric forms) and the circularly polarized radiation (CPL), this latter being present in interstellar media since it can be generated as synchrotron radiation (SR) from magnetic neutron stars. The ultraviolet CPL might therefore be responsible for enantiomeric selection in interstellar organic molecules.
Recently, the scientific community has started developing more and more effective spectroscopic and theoretical methodologies to study the asymmetry induced by the interaction chiral-matter (enantiomers)/chiral photon (CP-SR).
The research activity here proposed is aiming at combining in a synergism skills in different areas of Chemistry, namely stereoselective organic synthesis, ab initio quantum-mechanical theoretical modelling, nanomaterials synthesis, and SR-based photoelectron spectroscopies, to investigate intrinsic electronic properties of selected model chiral molecules at unprecedently achieved level.