中文 |

Newsroom

Regioselective Magnetization Enables Chiral Semiconducting Heteronanorods

Feb 26, 2020

A study, led by Prof. YU Shuhong from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Prof. TANG Zhiyong from National Center for Nanoscience and Technology of CAS, and Prof. Edward H. Sargent from University of Toronto, has shed new lights on the topic of chiral inorganic nanomaterials. The researchers demonstrated a regioselective magnetization strategy and achieved a library of semiconducting heteronanorods with chiroptical activities. This study was published in Nature Nanotechnology. 

Chirality, the property of an object non-superimposable with its mirror image, is of widespread interest in physics, chemistry, and biology. Traditional chemical construction of chiral nanomaterials by the introduction of chiral structures has its limitation due to such materials’ environmental instability and poor conductivity. 

Designing magneto-optical nanomaterials offers an opportunity to modulate the interactions between electric and magnetic dipoles via the local magnetic field, underlining another promising approach to enable chirality. To materialize such chiroptically active media, the growth of magnetic units (i.e. Fe3O4) has to be achieved at targeted locations of parent nanomaterials. One-dimensional chalcogenide semiconductor nanorods stand out to serve as the parent materials due to their compelling qualities, however, technical challenges lie in the epitaxial growth between host and motif materials of large lattice and chemical mismatches, let alone the regioselective growth. 

Taking up the challenge, the researchers reported a double-buffer-layer engineering strategy, which is able to tune the surface activity and interfacial energy locally, and to achieve the selective growth of magnetic materials at specific locations on a wide variety of semiconducting nanorods. 

They first sequentially integrated Ag2S and Au intermediate layers at one apex of each nanorod to catalyze the site-specific growth of Fe3O4 nanodomains, leading to the high-yielding one-dimensional ZnxCd1-xS-Ag2S/Au@Fe3O4 quaternary heteronanorods, whose structure has been validated through power X-ray diffraction patterns. 

Besides, they examined the structure and formation mechanism of the products and investigated their electron dynamics. The obtained nanomaterials exhibit high optical activity and furthermore, the absorption of these nanorods across the ultraviolet and visible regime can be controlled by the Zn/Cd ratio, where 0.9:0.1 was proved to be better according to the experiments.  

The phenomena is demonstrated that, due to the location-specific magnetic field introduced by the site-specific Fe3O4 nanoparticle, the resulting magnetized heteronanorods exhibit deflected electric dipole moment. In this way, the angle deflection between electric and magnetic transition dipoles induces chiroptical activity in the absence of chiral ligands, helical structures, and chiral lattices, a phenomenon not observed outside of modulation. 

The researchers’ other experiments suggested that the method can be applied to other semiconductor system as well. The regioselective magnetization strategy opens a new avenue to designing optically active nanomaterials for chirality and spintronics. 

Contact

Jane FAN Qiong

University of Science and Technology of China

E-mail:

Regioselective magnetization in semiconducting nanorods

Related Articles
Contact Us
  • 86-10-68597521 (day)

    86-10-68597289 (night)

  • 86-10-68511095 (day)

    86-10-68512458 (night)

  • cas_en@cas.cn

  • 52 Sanlihe Rd., Xicheng District,

    Beijing, China (100864)

Copyright © 2002 - Chinese Academy of Sciences