Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NMER (Chirality-sensitive Nuclear Magnetoelectric Resonance)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-12-31
Let us imagine that one can pass through the mirror, as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass”, and see how the world we know would look like on the other side of the mirror. Surprisingly, biscuits would still be sweet, although not fattening. The toxicity of a “red tide”, i.e. algal bloom, would be greatly reduced since the mirror counterpart of naturally occurring algal toxin does not fit human receptors. Caraway would smell like mint, and mint would smell like caraway, which is a consequence of one of the mirror forms of carvone being responsible for caraway’s odor while the other is responsible for mint’s odor. In order to study such intriguing phenomena caused by the molecules that differ from their mirror images (enantiomers), i.e. chiral molecules, appropriate research tools are necessary, the establishment of which is the goal of the project. In order to achieve this challenging goal, the project aims to combine the strengths of studies of interactions of matter with the electromagnetic field and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The advantage of using light-matter interactions in the optical domain is that it provides direct information on which enantiomers are present in the sample. The main benefit of applying magnetic resonance is the determination of the molecular structure with atomic resolution, which is even possible in the case of studies of complex mixtures and provides the spatial distribution of the molecules. However, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is blind to molecular chirality. Lifting such an obstacle opens a very attractive way to study chirality from an entirely different angle, which is especially important in understanding differences in the bioactivity of chiral molecules, e.g. pharmacologically active substances, since underestimation of such differences has severe sociomedical consequences, such as the thalidomide scandal.
The project's breakthrough feature is combining the use of antisymmetric nuclear interactions that were rarely explored in the past with the application of the electric field in addition to the usually used magnetic field in nuclear resonance experiments. Therefore, the project's tasks were focused mainly on advancing the understanding of the physics of the spin dynamics in chiral molecules and experimentally creating a unique distribution of the electromagnetic field oscillating at radio frequency, i.e. millions of times per second. To create such electromagnetic fields, radioelectronic systems were built and optimized so that the system's response related to molecule's chirality dominates over the standard nuclear resonance signal. On the one hand, the built radioelectronic systems are characterized by very high sensitivity to small signals generated by the sample. On the other hand, they enable precise control of the high-power electromagnetic field. Linear and nonlinear optical effects were used to determine how the electric field affects the behavior of a chiral molecule in solution and what properties the field generated by the built radioelectronic systems has. The foundations were also laid for the systematic symmetry-based method of determining what structural elements of a molecule are associated with the chirality-sensitive signal, which enables the analysis, interpretation and use of information related to antisymmetric nuclear interactions to fully determine the molecule's structure, including its chirality sense. In the theoretical aspect of the project, a coherent formalism was developed, allowing one to analyze the dynamics of nuclear spins in chiral molecules, and on its basis, several new experiments were proposed, enabling the study of chirality using the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with the atomic nuclei of chiral molecules.
The project advanced in finding novel chirality-sensitive phenomena in magnetic resonance spectroscopy, studies of the nuclear spin dynamics in chiral molecules with the aid of the open quantum systems theory, and obtaining unique electromagnetic filed distributions that were linked with molecular properties essential for the understanding of the connection between macroscopic field used by an experimenter and the microscopic properties of studied chiral molecules. The expected impact of chiral-sensitive NMR spectroscopy developed in the course of the project is on analytical chemistry (analysis of a complex mixture of chiral compounds), biochemistry (depending on understanding of chiral gest-host interaction), medicine (in the differentiation of the chiral pharmaceutical active ingredients, especially those that have many elements of symmetry generating its chirality), and food production (as a diagnostic method of determination of the food composition).