Chirality Driven Helical Pattern Formation

Abstract

We study the pattern formation of chiral charges in the presence of reactions. We show that, in contrast to the original Turing's mechanism of pattern formation in diffusion-reaction systems, the interplay between chiral effects and reactions can lead to a new kind of instability against spatially inhomogeneous perturbations, and furthermore, to a helical pattern formation, even without diffusion. This provides a new physical mechanism that can generate a macroscopic helical structure from microscopic chirality, including chirality of elementary particles, via nonequilibrium processes.