New findings related to the chiral selection from the TGD point of view

I learned of very interesting empirical findings related to the chiral selection of biomolecules (see the popular article). The article "Enantioselective Adsorption on Magnetic Surfaces" of Mohammad Reza Safari et al is published in journal Advanced Materials (2023) (see this).

The findings

Consider first the experimental arrangement and findings.

1. There is a copper conductor with a strong electric field in the normal direction of the conductor. Cu is not a magnetic substance. There are very thin Cobalt islands at the surface of the conductor. Cobalt is a magnetic metal. There are two options: magnetization direction is North or South and it corresponds to either up or down. North up and South down are the options and these could correspond to different chiralities somehow.
2. The molecules drift to the Cobalt islands and, depending on their chirality, prefer to bind to either south-up or north-up Cobalt islands. Are the magnetic fields of islands helical and possess a definite chirality? Does the magnetic chirality tend to be the same or opposite to that of the enantiomer that binds to it?
3. The effect is reported to occur already before the Cobalt islands in the drifting of molecules to the Cobalt islands. What does this mean? Counterparts of magnetic fields are not present.
4. It is also found that electrons with a given spin direction prefer to tunnel through the molecules in a direction which correlates with the chirality.

TGD view of the findings

These are highly interesting findings providing new empirical hints about the nature of chiral selection in living matter. Weak interactions are really weak and parity violation effects should be extremely small above weak scale so that standard model fails to explain chiral selection.

1. Chiral selection is one of the key empirical facts supporting the TGD prediction of a hierarchy of phases of ordinary matter predicted by the number theoretical vision of TGD. These phases are labelled by effective Planck constant h_eff, which is essentially the dimension of an algebraic extension of rationals.
2. The predicted huge values of h_eff mean that weak interactions become as strong as em interactions below the scale up Compton length of weak bosons, which, being proportional to h_eff, can be as large as cell size. This amplifies parity violation effects.
3. Large h_eff phases behave like dark matter: they do not however explain galactic dark matter, which in the TGD framework is dark energy assignable to cosmic strings (no halo and automatically prediction of flat velocity spectrum). Instead, large h_eff phases solve the missing baryon problem. The density of baryons has decreased in cosmic evolution (having biological evolution as a particular aspect) and the explanation is that evolution as unavoidable increase of algebraic complexity measured by h_eff has transformed them to h_eff>h phases at the magnetic bodies (thickened cosmic string world sheets, 4-D objects), in particular those involved with living matter.
4. The large value of h_eff has a geometric interpretation. Space-time surface can be regarded as manys-sheeted over both M⁴ and CP₂ . In the first case the CP₂ coordinates are many-valued functions of M⁴ coordinates. In the latter case M⁴ coordinates are many-valued functions of CP₂ coordinates. This case is highly interesting in the case of quantum biology. Since a connected space-time surface defines the quantum coherence region, an ensemble of, say, monopole flux tubes can define a quantum coherent region in the latter case: one simply has an analog of Bose-Einstein condensate of monopole flux tubes.

Consider now a concrete model for the findings in the TGD framework.

1. A good guess is that the molecular monopole flux tubes of the molecules and of the magnetic fields assignable with the Cobalt islands tend to have the same chirality. This would generalize the chirality selection from the level of biomolecules to the level of dark monopole flux tubes. Some kind of condensate of flux tubes of the same chirality as a long scale parity violation would be in question.
2. In the TGD framework, the North up and South up magnetic fields could correspond to helical monopole flux tubes of opposite chiralities. The helical structure is essential and could relate directly to the requirement that the flux tube is closed: one could have a shape of flattened square for which the long sides form a double helix. This would be the case also for DNA.
3. Parity violation requires a large value of h_eff. Dark Z bosons could generate a large parity violation. Dark Z boson Compton length of order biological scale. The very large value of h_eff would give the needed large energy splitting between generalized cyclotron energies at the dark flux tube and induce chiral selection.

   Gravitational flux tubes of Earth's gravitational field or solar gravitational field would do the job. By the Equivalence Principle, the gravitational Compton length Λ_gr,E= .5 cm for Earth does not depend on the particle mass and looks like a promising scale. Also the cyclotron energies are independent of the mass of the charged particle since ℏ_gr is proportional to particle mass m and cyclotron frequency to 1/m.

4. Also the electric field of the Copper surface should have an important role. The electric field orthogonal to Cu conductor would correspond to electric flux tubes. The consistency condition for the electric flux tube thickness with charged at the bottom (conductor) reads as Λ_em(d)≈ d. ℏ_em= Ne²/β₀, N the number of electrons at the bottom. The values of h_eff are rather small. There is roughly one electron per atom. N≈ 10⁴ per flux tube area of 100 nm² having radius about 10 nm. Λ_em= Ne²/β₀ λ_e is about 1 nm for β₀=1. The value of ℏ_em are rather small and it seems that it cannot contribute to the chiral selection. One can however consider also the electric field of Earth, and in this case the situation could be different.

The effect occurs already before the Cobalt islands. Furthermore, electrons with a given spin direction prefer to tunnel through the molecules in a direction dicrated by the chirality. What could this mean?

1. The counterparts of magnetic fields are present as dark magnetic fields inside the magnetic bodies of the drifting molecules. Suppose that dark molecular gravitational monopole tubes are indeed present and give rise to closed spin current loops with a direction determined by the chirality of the molecule. This would give rise to the large parity violation but how to understand the occurrence of the effect already before the Cobalt islands?
2. Could one assign a definite chirality also to the electric flux tubes assignable to the Cu surface and assume that the molecular chirality tends to be the same (or opposite) to this chirality? Do also these closed monopole flux tubes carry dark electric current?

   The spin direction of the current carrying electrons would correlate with the magnetization direction so that the magnetic body of the molecule would prefer a pairing with the electric body with a preferred spin direction. The preferred pairing would explain the drift to a correct Cobalt island: the paths leading to the Cobalt island would be more probable.

3. In the case of water, the Pollack effect (see this) transfers part of the protons of water molecules to dark protons at monopole flux tubes. Now there are no protons available.

   Does this require a generalization of the Pollack effect? Could the electric flux tubes be gravitational flux tubes carrying electrons instead of protons? Gravitational Compton length would be the same. Could electronic Pollack effect for conductors as a dual of Pollack effect for water be in question.

4. In the TGD inspired quantum biology, one assigns genetic code with dark proton triplets. Could one assign a dark realization of the genetic code to dark electron triplets? Could the electric counterparts of gravitational flux tubes carrying dark realization of the genetic code define dark genetic code? Codons would correspond to dark electron triplets instead of dark proton triplets. Could the analogs of the ordinary genetic codons correspond to the triplets of electron holes at the conductor surface?

   The TGD based vision about universal genetic code suggests the existence of a 2-D analog of DNA realized in terms of mathematically completely unique hyperbolic icosa tetrahedral tessellation. Could this genetic code be associated with the metal surfaces? The implications of this hidden genetic code for computers might be rather dramatic.

See the article New findings related to the chiral selection or the chapter Quantum Mind, Magnetic Body, and Biological Body.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.