Photothermal effect and the corresponding applications of chiral nanomaterials

Abstract

Chirality exists widely in nature and plays a very important role in the world. With the rapid development of nanomaterials, chirality has been successfully extended from the molecular scale to nanoscale. Nanomaterials with photothermal effect have promising applications in photothermal therapy, bacterial inhibition and photothermal catalysis. Nowadays, chiral nanomaterials with prominent photothermal effect have been developed, which not only provides a prospective solution for the treatment of diseases, targeted drug delivery and bacterial killing, but also achieves the purpose of enantioselective catalysis and enantiomer recognition. Therefore, the photothermal effect and the corresponding applications of chiral nanomaterials are reviewed in this paper. The preparation of chiral nanostructures is demonstrated in detail with some representative examples firstly. Then, the progress in the study of photothermal behaviors and the corresponding applications for chiral nanostructures in the past five years will be discussed. Finally, the possible opportunities as well as the challenges faced for the chiral nanostructures with photothermal effect are proposed.