Themed collection Chiral Inorganic Nanomaterials

Professor Nicholas A. Kotov, Professor Luis M. Liz-Marzán and Professor Qiangbin Wang introduce a themed collection in Materials Advances on chiral nanomaterials.

This perspective reports on recent progress toward the development of an approach to a priori predict - both chirality “strength” and efficacy of chirality transfer from a chiral nanoshape solute to an achiral nematic environment.

This review presents the main techniques employed to construct chiral plasmonic materials and metasurfaces, in particular using soft-chemistry approaches, and discusses some applications of these nanostructures.

We have shed light on the recent advances in imprinting chirality into achiral inorganic nanomaterials using organic chiral molecules, their structural analysis, growth mechanism, optical, optoelectronic, and bio-applications.

DNA nanotechnology enables to precisely construct chiroplasmonic assemblies at the nanometer scale. This review aims to look back so far the chiroplasmonic assemblies from a new perspective of the evolution of DNA programming methodology.

A comprehensive investigation of size- and optical-response-controlled chiral nanomaterials from morphological analysis to a fundamental understanding.

Helicity preserving nanostructures and metasurfaces have been proposed as candidates to enhance spectroscopic features of chiral molecules. With this in mind, we show that losses in the constituent materials impede the conservation of helicity in systems such as core–shells or inorganic chiral spheres.

Plasmonic nanoparticles with Ag shells have unique properties which can be harnessed to manipulate light at the nanoscale.

Maps of reaction rate constants across all surface orientations vicinal to Cu(111) reveal that D-tartaric acid decomposes preferentially on Cu(hkl)^S surfaces while L-tartaric acid decomposes preferentially on Cu(hkl)^R orientations.

The optical properties of nanoparticle clusters vary with the spatial arrangement of the constituent particles, but also the overall orientation of the cluster with respect to the incident light.

CdSe/ZnS quantum dots with circularly polarized luminescence in a nucleotide–amino acid hydrogel.

Light scattering from chiral plasmonic structures can create near fields with an asymmetry greater than the equivalent circularly polarised light, a property sometimes referred to as superchirality.