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Impact of Chiral Symmetry Breaking

Oct. 24, 2023

Chiral organic building blocks can be incorporated into hybrid organic-inorganic metal-halide crystalline semiconductors so as to control and impact the interconversion between light, charge, and spin.

Scientific Achievement

We showed how chiral organic molecules template non-chiral inorganic building blocks. We connected the chiral distortion to spin-splitting, chiral optical behavior, and the role of lone pair expression.

Significance and Impact

Chiral symmetry breaking coupled with large spin-orbit coupling induces a variety of novel physical phenomena. Here we show how to control symmetry breaking in metal halide dimers.

Research Details

  • Single crystals of R/S-MBA4B2X10 (B=Sb,Bi) (X=I,Br) were grown and structures solved.
  • Hybrid density functional theory was used to calculate band structures and spin-textures.
  • K.P model connected spin-textures to helical response and compared calculated spin-textures to measured circular dichroism.

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c01733

Related People

Peter Sercel
Peter Sercel Research, LLC.

David Mitzi
Duke University

Joseph Berry
University of Colorado

Volker Blum
Duke University

Matthew Beard
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Diagrams showing how chirality of organic impacts inorganic in two ways: 1.) Dimers are arranged helical pattern, and 2.) Dimers are asymmetrically distorted. Two charts show how chiral distortion causes chiral- spin splitting in conduction and valence, with explanation: To induce chiral-optical behavior, helical light must couple to helical response along propagation direction, i.e., the spin texture must of helical character.