Mechanism-based chemical understanding of chiral symmetry breaking in the Soai reaction. A combined probabilistic and deterministic description of chemical reactions.

The experimentally observed distribution of enantiomers in the Soai reaction is interpreted in this Article on the basis of a chemical mechanism using a newly developed stochastic kinetic method, accelerated Monte Carlo simulation combined with deterministic continuation and symmetrization. The method is in principle suitable for handling large mechanisms with realistic particle numbers and could be useful for any case where the kinetics of a process shows inherent random fluctuations. The mechanism shows how a slow initial reaction combined with efficient and highly enantioselective autocatalysis can give rise to chiral symmetry breaking under completely nonchiral external conditions.