Aspects of spontaneous separation of enantiomers in two- and three-dimensional crystals
β Scribed by Ivan Kuzmenko; Isabelle Weissbuch; Eugene Gurovich; Leslie Leiserowitz; Meir Lahav
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 318 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0899-0042
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
β¦ Synopsis
Spontaneous separation of enantiomers in two-and three-dimensional crystals is driven by the same thermodynamic and kinetic factors. However, amphiphilic crystalline monolayers at an interface cannot possess a center of inversion, the most common symmetry element in bulk crystals. This fact should, in principle, lead to better chances for spontaneous separation in the Langmuir or Langmuir-Blodgett monomolecular films. On the other hand, the monolayers of most amphiphiles studied to date incorporate long aliphatic chains that have an intrinsic tendency to pack in a herringbone motif requiring glide plane symmetry, thus creating a bias towards racemate formation. Moreover, 2-D crystals supposedly have a much higher degree of molecular and therefore enantiomeric disorder compared to bulk crystals. All these factors necessitate a careful choice of molecules to guarantee enantiomeric separation in two dimensions. Unambiguous detection of spontaneous resolution in 2-D appears to require atomic resolution of molecular packing arrangement, which can in principle be obtained by grazing incidence X-ray diffraction or atomic force microscopy, whereas in bulk solids spontaneous resolution can be easily detected by various macroscopic methods. This short review provides analogies between spontaneous separation in 3-D and recent examples in 2-D, showing that spontaneous separation generally depends upon subtle differences in molecular structure.
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