Endowing inorganic nanomaterials with circularly polarized luminescence

Abstract

Recently, materials with circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) properties have attracted substantial attention because they offer new perspectives in fundamental research and wide applications in photonics, bio‐encoding, catalysis, and so forth. Such importance has recently promoted the development of CPL‐active materials from the traditional realm of organics to newly released areas in inorganics. Due to the advantages of inorganic nanomaterials in stability, high luminescent quantum efficiency, material diversity, and the diversity of shapes and sizes, extensive research about CPL active inorganic nanomaterials has been done in the past decades leading to great signs of progress on synthesis, characterizations, and potential applications. In this review, therefore, we will thoroughly describe the general design principles of inorganic nanomaterials with CPL activity, basically according to the origins of chirality in inorganic nanomaterials: intrinsic chirality in inorganic nanomaterials, ligand‐induced chirality, and structural chirality caused by the supramolecular assembly, respectively. The representative applications of the CPL‐active inorganic nanomaterials are presented with respect to challenges, prospective, and problems that unsolved to date.

Liquid crystal-templated chiral nanomaterials: from chiral plasmonics to circularly polarized luminescence

“…Chiral plasmonic nanomaterials could exhibit unprecedented enhanced CD, amplified dissymmetry factor (gfactor), engineerable and dynamic chiroptical responses 41 , thus holding a great opportunity in plasmon-based technological applications, such as chiral sensing 48,49 , chirality detection [50][51][52] , surface-enhanced spectroscopies 53,54 , and beyond 55,56 . By using novel chiral soft templates, nanoscale luminescent building blocks are able to self-organize into chiral luminescent nanomaterials exhibiting significantly enhanced circularly polarized luminescence 28,[57][58][59][60][61] . Thanks to their promising photophysical properties, chiral luminescent nanomaterials have attracted significant attention in diverse areas, such as biological science 62 , 3D display 63 , spintronics 64,65 , enantioselective photochemistry 36,66 and information encryption 67,68 .…”

Chiral-Induced Ultrathin Covalent Organic Frameworks Nanosheets with Tunable Circularly Polarized Luminescence

“…Among the chiral optical applications, circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) pertained to the excited-state chirality of chiral emitters, which can be applied in 3D optical displays, , bioimaging, chiral photoelectric devices, and sensors. , So far, numerous chiral materials constructed from inorganic compounds, , organic molecules, polymers, , self-assembled supramolecules, liquid crystals, , and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) − have been designed and exploited for CPL property. Very recently only one example of chiral COFs (chirCOFs) constructed from the chiral ligand has been reported for CPL .…”

Achiral-Core-Metal Change in Isomorphic Enantiomeric Ag12Ag32 and Au12Ag32 Clusters Triggers Circularly Polarized Phosphorescence

“…SCXRD analysis demonstrates that R / S -Ag 12 Ag 32 and R / S -Au 12 Ag 32 crystallize in the chiral cubic space group P 432 (Tables S2 and S3), which is rarely observed among crystallized chiral clusters. − S -type S -Ag 12 Ag 32 and S -Au 12 Ag 32 as representatives are described in the following structural analysis. The inorganic framework of the S -Ag 12 Ag 32 cluster can be described as a concentric three-layer core-shell structure S 2– @Ag 12 @S 8 @Ag 32 with S 2– as the anion template, similar to a Russian nesting doll (Figure a).…”