Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Open Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Chemistry (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Chemistry

Advisor 1

Loredana Valenzano-Slough

Committee Member 1

Kathryn Perrine

Committee Member 2

Gregory Odegard

Abstract

The 2016 discovery of the chiral molecule propylene oxide (C3H6O) in the interstellar medium (ISM) has opened new avenues into explaining the origin of biomolecular homochirality on Earth. Thus, studies of chiral molecules in the ISM may be able to reveal more about the mechanism behind homochirality. However, while the search for chiral molecules in space has become an active field of study, astrochemical researchers have yet to detect other chiral molecules in the ISM. For this purpose, numerous characteristics for detectability have been outlined that may facilitate the discovery of other interstellar chiral molecules. With this in mind, this work proposes new chiral molecules for detection and applies density functional theory to make predictions of their infrared (IR) and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectra. After the validation of available experimental results, special focus is placed on 2-aminopropanal, which shares structural similarity to the amino acid alanine.

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