Brown Bag Seminar

Speaker: Noémie Globus, Ph.D., NYU/CCA

Title: The chiral puzzle of life

The origin of biological homochirality has been an intense field of research and debate since its discovery by Pasteur in 1848. The weak force, one of the fundamental forces operating in nature, is parity-violating. This is why it has been invoked to be responsible for the asymmetry in the molecules of life for nearly a century. On Earth, at ground level, 85% of our cosmic radiation dose comes from muons, formed in a decay involving the weak force. Therefore, the muons are magnetically polarized on average. I will discuss the role of the cosmic rays polarized components in the emergence of biological homochirality, and the possible implications for the search of life in other worlds.

Noémie Globus is a high energy astrophysicist. She has a joint post-doctoral position at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at the New York University and at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute since January, 2019.