Prof. Gil Markovich
Department of Physical Chemistry, School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, Israel
I will talk about two types of chiral symmetry breaking in inorganic nanocrystals that we study in our lab:
1. We have been working on nanocrystals made of inorganic materials which crystallize in chiral space groups (similar to quartz crystals). We have shown that using molecular chiral ligands in the preparation of the nanocrystals it is possible to control their handedness and obtain significant enantiomeric excess in the nanocrystal population. I will focus on our recent work on chiral terbium phosphate nanocrystals where we have shown that it is possible to obtain nanocrystals of a single handedness and almost devoid of any molecular ligands at their surface. We currently use the chiral surface of those nanocrystals for studies of enantioselective adsorption, where biomolecules such as aspartic acid exhibit high adsorption enantioselectivity.
2. We use chiral light (circularly polarized) irradiation to drive plasmon-induced photochemical shape transformation of symmetric metal (gold-silver) nanoparticles into chiral, optically active ones. I will focus on a particular example, of Au@Ag elongated nanocuboids transformed to asymmetric shapes by asymmetric plasmon resonance controlled galvanic replacement reaction.