Spiral trajectories of asymmetric molecules

Abstract Spiral patterns widely exist in both macroscopic and microscopic systems such as hearts, bacteria, and active matters but have never been reported at molecular length scale. The emergence of spiral patterns has considerable impacts on the trajectories of the objects and thus usually relates to various physical, chemical, biological and physiological processes. In this paper, we show that, down to the length scale of only several Angstroms, asymmetric molecules exhibit spiral patterns in their trajectories within finite time based on the under-damped Langevin equation and demonstrated by molecular dynamics simulation. The key to this observation lies in the asymmetric molecular architecture that leads to a translation–rotation coupling. This finding enriches the knowledge of spiral patterns to the molecular length scale, provides a new insight into the understanding of various processes at the molecular level, and may evoke new ideas on the understanding of the vortices in turbulence.