Cooperative expression of atomic chirality in inorganic nanostructures.
Cooperative chirality phenomena extensively exist in biomolecular and organic systems via intra- and inter-molecular interactions, but study of inorganic materials has been lacking. Here we report, experimentally and theoretically, cooperative chirality in colloidal cinnabar mercury sulfide nanocrystals that originates from chirality interplay between the crystallographic lattice and geometric morphology at different length scales. A two-step synthetic scheme is developed to allow control of critical parameters of these two types of handedness, resulting in different chiral interplays expressed as observables through materials engineering. Furthermore, we adopt an electromagnetic model with the finite element method to elucidate cooperative chirality in inorganic systems, showing excellent agreement with experimental results. Our study enables an emerging class of nanostructures with tailored cooperative chirality that is vital for fundamental understanding of nanoscale chirality as well as technology applications based on new chiroptical building blocks.
Department of Physics and Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Peng-Peng
PP
Wang
Department of Physics and Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.|Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Shang-Jie
0000-0002-5507-8425
SJ
Yu
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, USA.|Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China.
Alexander O
AO
Govorov
Department of Physics and Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Min
M
Ouyang