TY  - JOUR
AU  - Tsitsonis, Dimitrios
AU  - Kircher, Max
AU  - Novikovskiy, N. M.
AU  - Trinter, Florian
AU  - Williams, Joshua
AU  - Fehre, Kilian
AU  - Kaiser, Leon
AU  - Eckart, Sebastian
AU  - Kreuz, O.
AU  - Senftleben, Arne
AU  - Demekhin, Philipp
AU  - Berger, R.
AU  - Jahnke, Till
AU  - Schoeffler, Markus
AU  - Doerner, Reinhard
TI  - Probing Instantaneous Single-Molecule Chirality in the Planar Ground State of Formic Acid
JO  - Physical review letters
VL  - 136
IS  - 4
SN  - 0031-9007
CY  - College Park, Md.
PB  - APS
M1  - PUBDB-2026-00713
SP  - 043001
PY  - 2026
N1  - H-20010092
AB  - We experimentally demonstrate that individual molecules of formic acid are chiral even when they are in the vibronic ground state, which has a planar equilibrium structure. We ionize the C 1⁢𝑠 shell of the molecule and record the photoelectron in coincidence with positively charged fragments. This provides two consecutive measurements of the structure of one molecule, the first by photoelectron diffraction imaging and the second by Coulomb explosion imaging. We find that both measurements show the same handedness of the specific molecule. The phenomenon of being achiral on average but chiral at the level of individual molecules is general to prochiral molecules and is a consequence of the three-dimensional zero-point delocalization of the nuclei in the vibrational ground state.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
DO  - DOI:10.1103/bvqj-pm3n
UR  - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/646073
ER  -