From wearable sensors to personalised medicines and solar panels, nanostructures made from functional organic molecules are already enhancing our lives. Nonetheless, science is still playing catchup as nature has been nailing these structures for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, the most miraculous molecular structures of all exist as non-superimposable mirror image pairs; where the left and right-handed forms can have remarkably different interactions with electric and magnetic fields. Ultra-thin layers of these chiral molecular structures can be used to generate circularly polarised light for efficient display technologies, filter electron spins for high performance spintronic devices and to create encrypted patterns for security tags. In this talk, we will explore the mechanisms by which these strong chiral-optical (chiroptical) effects manifest in organic thin films and how to optimise the magnitude of the chiroptical response.

 

https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95982115892