The investigation of parity violation in chiral molecules has been a major challenge for my research group in Z�rich for several decades. Although some important questions could be answered, other problems have remained open (1-7). Electroweak quantum chemistry predicts a small energy difference ?pvE between the ground states of the enantiomers of chiral molecules, corresponding to a non-zero reaction enthalpy ?pvH0(at standard conditions) for the stereomutation reaction of chiral molecules (typical range:1 to 1000 pJ/mol).With parity conserving ordinary quantum chemistry this reaction enthalpy would be exactly zero by symmetry. After our discovery in 1995 that ?pvE is calculated to be typically by a factor of 10 to 100 larger than previously anticipated, theoretical results from many groups as well as ours have stabilized at these current values (see (4-6) and references cited therein). However, the experimental measurement of ?pvE remains a challenge (7). We shall in the lecture report on the current status of ongoing theory and experiments in our group, following the original proposal in (2,7, see also (4) and refs. cited therein).Our work is supported by ETH Z�rich, SNF and an Advanced Grant from ERC.(1) M. Quack, Parity Violation in Chiral Molecules: From Electroweak Quantum Chemistry Towards Experiment, Invited Lecture at the ACS Symposium 'Quantum Chemical Calculation of Molecular Properties: A Tribute to Professor Nicholas Handy, San Francisco , 10-14 August 2014'.(2) M. Quack, Chem. Phys. Lett., 132, 147 (1986).(3) M. Quack, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl., 28, 571 (1989) and 41, 4618 (2002).(4) M. Quack, Fundamental Symmetries and Symmetry Violations from High Resolution Spectroscopy, In Handbook of High Resolution Spectroscopy; Vol. 1; M. Quack, F. Merkt, Eds.; Wiley: Chichester, New York, (2011), pages 659-722.(5) M. Quack, J. Stohner, M. Willeke, Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem., 59, 741 (2008).(6) M. Quack, Frontiers in Spectroscopy, Faraday Disc. 150, 533-565 (2011).(7) P. Dietiker, E. Miloglyadov, M. Quack, A. Schneider and G. Seyfang, in Proc. SASP 2014, Innsbruck University Press (IUP), Innsbruck 2014.

Parity violation in chiral molecules:  From electroweak  quantum chemistry  towards experiment

248th National Meeting (2014)

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