Tailoring Chiroptical Activity of Iron Disulfide Quantum Dot Hydrogels with Circularly Polarized Light

Abstract

Chiral inorganic nanomaterials have recently attracted significant attention because of their many important applications, such as in asymmetric catalysis and chiral sensing. Here, chiral iron disulfide quantum dots (FeS2 QDs) are synthesized via chirality transfer using l/d‐cysteine (Cys) as chiral ligands. The chiral FeS2 QDs are coassembled with two gelators to produce a cogel (l‐ or d‐[Gel+FeS2]) with a g‐factor value of ±0.06. Interestingly, the cogels display intense circularly polarized luminescence. More significantly, the degree of twisting (twist pitch) and the diameter of the cogels can be markedly regulated by illumination with circularly polarized light (CPL) in the ranges of 120–213 and 37–65 nm, respectively, which is caused by the CPL‐induced electron transfer. This research opens the way for the design of chiroptical devices with a wide range of functions and applications.

Ligand-induced chirality and optical activity in semiconductor nanocrystals: theory and applications

“…Copyright 2019 American Chemical Society. [122]. The resulting superstructures have a shape of twisted nanofibers and demonstrate both CD and CPL signals.…”

Competitive induction of circularly polarized luminescence of CdSe/ZnS quantum dots in a nucleotide–amino acid hydrogel

“…The co-assembling achiral quantum dots with chiral matrixes can be developed for the fabrication of CPL-active QDs. [25][26][27][28][29][30] In the case of chiral molecules capped QDs, the dissymmetry factor or g lum , which is an important parameter to measure the performance of CPL activity, is relatively small. Although the co-assembly way increased the g lum , CPL-active QDs hybrids were only realized in the organic phases.…”

Chirality Affecting Reaction Dynamics of HgS Nanostructures Simultaneously Visualized in Real and Reciprocal Space

“…Chirality occurs commonly in organic and biological molecules/compounds [7][8][9][10] . Nevertheless, inorganic chiral entities possess distinctive characteristics such as the facile control of crystal structures and the tolerance to high-temperature stresses, which exhibit great promise for applications in chiral sensing [11][12][13] , advanced optical devices [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] , and asymmetric catalysis [22][23][24][25] .…”