Nano Today
Volume 30, February 2020, 100824
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Review
Novel properties and applications of chiral inorganic nanostructures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2019.100824Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An overview on the synthesis, chiral properties and applications of chiral inorganic nanostructures.

  • Summarize the approaches and molecules utilized to synthesize chiral inorganic nanostructures.

  • The complex chirality originations of chiral inorganic nanostructures are discussed.

  • The versatile applications of chiral inorganic nanostructures are reviewed and evaluated.

Abstract

Chiral inorganic nanostructures have drawn much attention by virtue of their fascinating fundamental physical properties as well as the abundant applications. Over the past two decades, much effort has been paid to chiral inorganic nanostructures and substantial progresses have been achieved from the sample preparation, chirality origination investigation to practical applications. In this review, we summarize and evaluate the recent progresses of the chiral inorganic nanostructures. The sample synthesis approaches as well as experimental & theoretical studies of chirality originations are discussed. In addition, the unique intrinsic chirality caused by the dislocation is also presented in the review. The representative applications of the chiral inorganic nanostructures such as circular polarized light emission, interaction between chiral nanostructures and bio-systems, second harmonic generation, chiral catalysis, chiral assembly, chiral sensing, DNA cleavage etc. are also presented. We end up with discussing the challenges and future prospects of the chiral inorganic nanostructures in the last section. It is envisioned that the chiral inorganic nanostructures may play more and more impactful roles in versatile fields.

Section snippets

1 Introduction

Chirality is known as a description of geometrical property, where the mirror image of a structure cannot superimpose with the original one, namely, the Sn symmetry elements do not exist [1]. Applying this definition into a nanoscale object leads to a chiral nanostructure. Similar to the chiral molecules, two non-superimposable nanostructures with mirror image symmetry are termed as enantiomers. The important property of chiral nanostructures lies in their different response to right and

2 Synthesis methods and chirality origination mechanism of the chiral inorganic nanostructures

In this section, we describe the fabrication of different types of chiral inorganic e.g. semiconductor, magnetic and metal nanostructures. After more than two decades, researchers now can control the morphology of the chiral nanostructures: dots, rods, platelet etc. All of the inorganic nanostructures and chiral molecules/templates mentioned in this review are summarized in the end of this section (Table 1). Even though various types of methods have been suggested to prepare chiral inorganic

3 Applications of chiral inorganic nanostructures

Currently, chiral inorganic nanostructures have shown a huge potential in various fields. In this section, instead of giving a complete list, we review and discuss some typical and promising applications.

4 Summary and prospect

It has been more than 20 years since the discovery of the first chiral inorganic nanostructure e.g. Au nanoclusters. Substantial progress in this field has been made in terms of both fabrication approaches and application demonstrations, as discussed in this review. The breakthrough of the sample preparation, especially the appearance of the universal ligand exchange approach guarantees and promotes the widespread exploration of the inorganic nanostructures. The theoretical

Declaration of Competing Interest

All the authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Ministry of Education Singapore through the Academic Research Fund under Projects MOE Tier 1, RG 189/17 and RG 105/16 as well as Tier 2 MOE2016-T2-1-054. This work was also supported by a multi-year research grant (MYRG2017-0008-FHS) by the University of Macau, Macau SAR, China; The Macao Science and Technology and Development Fund (FDCT) grant (0292017A1, 01012018A3).

Lian Xiao received his Bachelor's degree in physics from Sichuan University and Ph.D. degree in physics from Nanyang Technological University. He is currently a research fellow in the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include nanomaterials, bio-applications, optical spectroscopy, semiconductor physics, and micro-fluidics.

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    Lian Xiao received his Bachelor's degree in physics from Sichuan University and Ph.D. degree in physics from Nanyang Technological University. He is currently a research fellow in the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include nanomaterials, bio-applications, optical spectroscopy, semiconductor physics, and micro-fluidics.

    Tingting An received his Bachelor's degree in biology from Northeast Normal University and Master degree in biology from Sichuan University. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Health Science, University of Macau. Her research interests include Breast cancer associated gene 1 (BRCA1) in mammary gland development and tumorigenesis, tumor microenvironment, bio nanomaterials.

    Lin Wang received her Bachelor's degree from North University of China. She was a joint‐PhD student in Nanyang Technological University for two years and received her Doctoral degree from Hubei University. She is currently carrying out her postdoctoral research with Prof. Sun Handong in Singapore. Her research interests include nanomaterials and technology, optoelectronic materials and devices, semiconductor photophysics, etc.

    Xiaoling Xu is currently an associated professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau. She received her Bachelor's degree in biology from West China Normal University, and her Master degree from Institute of Hydrobiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences and PhD degrees from Molecular Biology Program in University of Maryland, USA, respectively. Her research interest is cancer biology

    Handong Sun is currently with the School of Physical and Mathematical Science, Nanyang Technological University. He received his Bachelor's degree in physics from Dalian University of Technology, and his Master's and PhD degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, respectively. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. His research interests cover optoelectronic materials and devices, semiconductor physics, optical spectroscopy, nanomaterials, and applications in microfluidics.

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    These authors contribute equally this work.

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