(474a) Chiroptical Activity Enhanced Nanoparticles

Chirality can be considered as a ubiquitous relationship between structure and function in nature. Thus it is one of the cornerstones of todayâ??s fundamental and applied research for the investigation of the intimate structure and property relationships of matter. Since matter structured on a length scale comparable to or smaller than the wavelength of light can exhibit unusual optical properties, chiral nanoparticles (NPs) have received a great deal of attention as promising candidates for exotic optical functions as in non-linear optics or negative refraction and so forth. The interdisciplinary character of NPs and the ease of their integration into composite materials also provide excellent opportunities to explore new dissymmetric materials. To achieve this goal, the high chiroptical activity of individual NPs is in demand as building blocks.

Here we demonstrated a simple one-pot synthesis method which yields NPs having highly enhanced optical activity. The obtained NPs showed anisotropy factors of g=0.02 which is comparable to naturally chiral proteins, ~10x higher than conventionally synthesized NPs. Due to the high optical activity and simple synthesis procedure, this strategy offers wide range of applications as chiral sensors, catalysts and as metamaterials in advanced optical devices.