title: Helical graphitic carbon nitrides with photocatalytic and optical activities.
abstract: Graphitic carbon nitride can be imprinted with a twisted hexagonal rod-like morphology by a nanocasting technique using chiral silicon dioxides as templates. The helical nanoarchitectures promote charge separation and mass transfer of carbon nitride semiconductors, enabling it to act as a more efficient photocatalyst for water splitting and CO2 reduction than the pristine carbon nitride polymer. This is to our knowledge a unique example of chiral graphitic carbon nitride that features both left- and right-handed helical nanostructures and exhibits unique optical activity to circularly polarized light at the semiconductor absorption edge as well as photoredox activity for solar-to-chemical conversion. Such helical nanostructured polymeric semiconductors are envisaged to hold great promise for a range of applications that rely on such semiconductor properties as well as chirality for photocatalysis, asymmetric catalysis, chiral recognition, nanotechnology, and chemical sensing.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Photocatalysis on Energy and Environment, College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350002 (China) http://wanglab.fzu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Lihua
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Xiangju
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.forename: Fangsong
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Xinchen
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
keywords: chirality; graphitic carbon nitride; helical nanorods; optical activity; photocatalysis