Novel properties and applications of chiral inorganic nanostructures

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.