Chiral symmetry breaking in nonequilibrium chemical systems: Time scales for chiral selection

The process through which an extremely weak parity violating interaction, of energy ΔE, can become the selector of molecular chirality over a sufficiently long time is discussed. For a model system it is shown that ΔE ≈ 5 × 10^-15kT can give a 90% selectivity in about 300 h - smaller ΔE being relevant to prebiotic evolution.