Physical Reasons for Overcoming the Chiral Catastrophe Paradox

Abstract

In 1996, Avetisov and Goldanskii demonstrated that the formation of homochiral polymers from racemic mixtures of enantiomers is possible if the difference in binding energy between like and opposite enantiomers is at least 6–8 kT (15–20 kJ/mol). However, theoretical estimates indicate that this energy cannot exceed kT. At the same time, similar processes are observed experimentally and should have taken place at the dawn of life on Earth. This contradiction has been called the “chiral catastrophe” and remains unresolved to this day. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate the fundamental possibility of overcoming chiral catastrophe through the effect of chiral-induced spin selectivity, which provides a sufficiently strong (up to 100 kJ/mol) exchange interaction between chiral molecules. This allows us to describe the thermodynamics of the formation of homochiral chains of molecules in a medium with any degree of chiral polarization in the absence of specialized enzymes, which was previously theoretically considered a physical paradox.