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Abstract
Chirality plays an important role in science from enantiomeric separation in chemistry to chiral plasmonics in nanotechnology. However, the understanding of chirality amplification from chiral building blocks to ordered helical superstructures remains a challenge. Here, we demonstrate that topological defects, such as screw dislocations, can drive the chirality transfer from particle to supramolecular structure level during the crystallization process. By using a model system of chiral particles, which enables direct imaging of single particle incorporation into growing crystals, we show that the crystallization kinetic pathway is the key parameter for monitoring, via the defects, the chirality amplification of the crystalline structures from racemic to predominantly homohelical. We provide an explanation based on the interplay between geometrical frustration, racemization induced by thermal fluctuations, and particle chirality. Our results demonstrate that screw dislocations not only promote the growth, but also control the chiral morphology and therefore the functionality of crystalline states.
Highlights
Chirality plays an important role in science from enantiomeric separation in chemistry to chiral plasmonics in nanotechnology
The qualitative comparison of the free energy associated with the different platelet morphologies has to be considered
The geometric frustration of locally preferred hexagonal packing competing with the intrinsic twist of the chiral colloidal rods leads to introduction of either stress or defects in the structure[36,37]
Summary
Chirality plays an important role in science from enantiomeric separation in chemistry to chiral plasmonics in nanotechnology. We demonstrate that topological defects, such as screw dislocations, can drive the chirality transfer from particle to supramolecular structure level during the crystallization process. We show that introducing screw dislocation defects promotes the formation of helical crystals, whose handedness is tunable and driven both by growth rate and chirality of the constituent particles. If screw dislocations have been shown to favor the crystal growth, following the pioneering work of Franck[15], as well as more recently to drive the one-dimensional (1D) or two-dimensional (2D) growth of nanowires and nanostructures[13,16,17,18,19], we evidence here an additional role of these ubiquitous topological defects: monitoring and tuning the chiral morphology and the functionality of crystalline materials[3,20]
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