Abstract
Mirror asymmetry of electronic states or optical media is expected for the emission of chiral photons, which constrains the design of dichroic materials. Here we demonstrate that these symmetry restrictions can be relaxed by harnessing the local chirality of globally achiral materials, also known as chirotopicity. Unlike chirotopic sites in molecules whose optical effects are unknown, photonic nanostructures make possible the enhancement and deliberate localization of left- and right-handed chirotopic fields by linearly polarized light. We show that intense and highly elliptic light is emitted from achiral luminophores engulfed by such fields. Luminescence dissymmetry factors between 1.65 and −1.58, approaching the theoretical limit, are obtained for nanoparticles and dyes, which may be generalized to other luminophores. After being hypothesized by Mislow more than 50 years ago, these findings validate the concept of chirotopicity and enable its utilization in chiral photonics.
Similar content being viewed by others
Acknowledgments
This work was partially carried out at the USTC Center for Micro and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication. The authors also thank Prof. Joel Yang, Prof. Zhaogang Dong and Dr. Hongtao Wang for their help in the initial sample fabrication.
Funding
Y.C. and Yiming W. acknowledge the support from the National Key Research and Development Project (Grant No. 2024YFA1410900). Y.C. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62275241). S.H. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 22004087), Natural Science Foundation of Top Talent of SZTU (Grant No. 20200202) and Shenzhen Higher Education Stable Support Program (Grant No. SZWD202206). Yiming W. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52372156, 62288102). D.W. acknowledges the support from the National Key Research and Development Project (Grant No. 2021YFF0502700) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62325507, 61927814).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Wu, Y., Wang, Z., Wu, Z. et al. Chiral emission from chirotopic nanostructures. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74088-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74088-8
