Recent advances in chiral nanomaterials with unique electric and magnetic properties.

Research on chiral nanomaterials (NMs) has grown radically with a rapid increase in the number of publications over the past decade. It has attracted a large number of scientists in various fields predominantly because of the emergence of unprecedented electric, optical, and magnetic properties when chirality arises in NMs. For applications, it is particularly informative and fascinating to investigate how chiral NMs interact with electromagnetic waves and magnetic fields, depending on their intrinsic composition properties, atomic distortions, and assembled structures. This review provides an overview of recent advances in chiral NMs, such as semiconducting, metallic, and magnetic nanostructures.

Broad Chiroptical Activity from Ultraviolet to Short-Wave Infrared by Chirality Transfer from Molecular to Micrometer Scale.

Chiral nanomaterials provide a rich platform for versatile applications. Tuning the wavelength of polarization rotation maxima in the broad range including short-wave infrared (SWIR) is a promising candidate for infrared neural stimulation, imaging, and nanothermometry. However, the majority of previously developed chiral nanomaterials reveal the optical activity in a relatively shorter wavelength range (ultraviolet-visible, UV-vis), not in SWIR. Here, we demonstrate a versatile method to synthesize chiral copper sulfides using cysteine, as the stabilizer, and transferring the chirality from molecular- to the microscale through self-assembly. The assembled structures show broad chiroptical activity in the UV-vis-NIR-SWIR region (200-2500 nm). Importantly, we can tune the chiroptical activity by simply changing the reaction conditions. This approach can be extended to materials platforms for developing next-generation optical devices, metamaterials, telecommunications, and asymmetric catalysts.