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.