Abstract
Electronic chirality within single molecules constitutes an intriguing phenomenon in quantum chemistry, whose inducing mechanism however remains underexplored. Here, we report a distinct formation mechanism for electronic chirality in CuPc molecules adsorbed on bilayer graphene on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite, as incurred via twisted π-π stacking. Scanning tunneling microscopy measurements unveil that CuPc molecules exhibit prominent chirality in morphology at low biases, but restore their D4h symmetry at large biases, demonstrating the chirality is electronic origin. With tip manipulations, the two enantiomers of CuPc can be reversibly switched. Density functional theory calculations reveal that the electronic chirality arises from π-π hybridization between CuPc and graphene, leading to asymmetric charge distribution. The chiral configuration is determined by adsorption sites and rotation angles relative to graphene, in agreement with experimental observations. This work uncovers a π-π hybridization mechanism for driving electronic chirality, providing a platform for designing chiral molecular electronic devices.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study, including unprocessed raw data, are available from Zenodo32 and from the corresponding authors upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code used in this study is available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Jingtao Lü for helpful discussions. This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFA1402400), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 92265201, 92477137).
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H.J.Q. and J.J.L. did the experiments with the help of W.A.L., D.B.W., and T.H.L. J.Y.; R.J.S. did the DFT calculations; Y.S.F., H.J.Q., R.J.S., J.J.L., W.A.L., D.B.W., C.F.L., and W.H.Z. analyzed the data. Y.S.F., H.J.Q., and R.J.S. wrote the manuscript with comments from all authors. Y.S.F. supervised the project.
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Qin, HJ., Sun, RJ., Liu, JJ. et al. Molecular electronic chirality in copper phthalocyanine induced via twisted π-π stacking on bilayer graphene. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69713-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69713-5
