Investigating the Role of Cosmic Radiation in the Emergence of Biological Homochirality

The origin of homochirality - the specific handedness of biomolecules - remains a central question in the study of life's origins. One proposed mechanism suggests that spin-polarized cosmic ray muons can induce asymmetric damage in chiral biomolecules, leading to homochirality over evolutionary timescales. This past September at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), we irradiated left- and right-handed RNA samples by a spin-polarized muon beam, in search of a chiral bias in the measured RNA damage. In preparation for this experiment, we used the Geant4-DNA Monte Carlo toolkit to simulate indirect and direct DNA damage, omitting considerations of spin polarization, to understand how large an effect we would expect from a muon beamline at 100 MeV/c. We will present the results of the experiment, compare them to our simulations to assess model accuracy, and propose directions for further modeling and experimentation.