Spectroscopic investigation reveals persistent supramolecular chirality in solid-state 2-propyl-1H-benzimidazole, highlighting spontaneous symmetry breaking in achiral molecules.
2-Propyl-1H-benzimidazole (2PrBzIm) is a small molecule, commercially available, which displays a curious behavior in the solid state. 2PrBzIm, although devoid of chirality by fast rotation about a single bond of the propyl group in solution, crystallizes as a conglomerate showing chiroptical properties. An exhaustive analysis of its crystal structure and a wide range of experiments monitored by vibrational circular dichroism spectroscopy eliminated all possibilities of an artifact. What remains is a new example of the unexplained phenomenon of persistent supramolecular chirality.
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Quesada‐Moreno et al. (2017) studied this question.
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