Abstract
In hybrid metal halide perovskites, chiroptical properties typically arise from structural symmetry breaking by incorporating a chiral A-site organic cation within the structure, which may limit the compositional space. Here we demonstrate highly efficient remote chirality transfer where chirality is imposed on an otherwise achiral hybrid metal halide semiconductor by a proximal chiral molecule that is not interspersed as part of the structure yet leads to large circular dichroism dissymmetry factors (gCD) of up to 10−2. Density functional theory calculations reveal that the transfer of stereochemical information from the chiral proximal molecule to the inorganic framework is mediated by selective interaction with divalent metal cations. Anchoring of the chiral molecule induces a centro-asymmetric distortion, which is discernible up to four inorganic layers into the metal halide lattice. This concept is broadly applicable to low-dimensional hybrid metal halides with various dimensionalities (1D and 2D) allowing independent control of the composition and degree of chirality.
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Data availability
All data are available in the Article and Supplementary Information, or on request from the corresponding authors. Supplementary Data 1 contains the structure coordinates for lattice and relaxed ion positions. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (DOE) under contract no. DE-AC36-08GO28308. This project was supported by the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science within the DOE. The views expressed in the Article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the US Government. We thank P. Therdkatanyuphong for providing a sample of R/S-BHO.
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M.A.H., M.C.B. and J.M.L. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. R.B. assisted in CD measurements. S.P.H. performed the TOF-SIMS measurements. B.A. carried out the NMR experiments. M.P.H. synthesized the (R-MBA)2PbI4 crystals. Y.D. and M.C.B. contributed to optical measurements. A.G. and Y.P. performed the DFT calculations and wrote the analysis. J.Z. and S.R.M. synthesized the R/S-BHO and R/S-BHS chiral molecules. J.Y.Y., K.Z. and J.J.B. performed and analysed XPS measurements. H.H.W. and Z.V.V. performed the Faraday rotation measurements. J.L.B. performed the FTIR measurements and analysis. Y.X. and D.B.M. contributed to XRD measurements and analysis. M.A.H. and J.M.L. wrote the initial draft of the paper, and all authors contributed to the editing of the paper.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–58, Notes 1–9, Tables 1 and 2 and additional methods.
Supplementary Data 1
Structure coordinates for the lattice and relaxed ion positions.
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Source Data Figs. 2 and 4
CD spectra source data for Figs. 2 and 4.
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Haque, M.A., Grieder, A., Harvey, S.P. et al. Remote chirality transfer in low-dimensional hybrid metal halide semiconductors. Nat. Chem. 17, 29–37 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-024-01662-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-024-01662-2
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