Chirality and Gravitational Parity Violation

In this review, parity-violating gravitational potentials are presented as possible sources of both true and false chirality. In particular, whereas phenomenological long-range spin-dependent gravitational potentials contain both truly and falsely chiral terms, it is shown that there are models that extend general relativity including also coupling of fermionic degrees of freedom to gravity in the presence of torsion, which give place to short-range truly chiral interactions similar to that usually considered in molecular physics. Physical mechanisms which give place to gravitational parity violation together with the expected size of the effects and their experimental constraints are discussed. Finally, the possible role of parity-violating gravity in the origin of homochirality and a road map for future research works in quantum chemistry is presented. Chirality 27:375-381, 2015.(c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.