The model involves asymmetries in the way certain particles interact with biomolecules at the nuclear level. It works through selective destruction: If there are initially equal numbers of left- and right-handed molecules and one kind is destroyed preferentially, then theres an imbalance.

My colleagues and I realized that a nucleus within an amino acid could be destroyed in a spin-polarized way via the weak force, a parity-violating interaction. To explore this idea, we looked first at destructive interactions involving spin-polarized leptonsspecifically neutrinos, which are inherently chiraland nitrogen atoms in amino acids. The destructive mechanism we explored is inverse beta decay. In that decay, the nitrogen atom becomes carbon-14 or oxygen-14, a process that destroys the whole amino acid. Theres also a nuclear recoil, which can literally rip the molecule apart.

But this process is only chirality selective if the amino-acid molecules all align with each other. If that happens, only amino acids of one chirality will be pointing in a direction that allows their nitrogen atoms to interact with the neutrinos. This alignment could happen through crystallization, where the molecules all line up naturally, or it could happen in an electric field, for example.

Read the rest here:
Biochemistry Among the Stars - Physics