Bow-tie particles boast a tunable twist

Kahr, Bart

doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00705-x

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15 March 2023

Bow-tie particles boast a tunable twist

Particles that self-assemble from nanoribbons into bow-tie-shaped structures can be tailored to change the degree of their twist. A search for how best to quantify this twist homes in on a measure of how the bow ties respond to light.

Bart Kahr ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7005-4464⁰

Bart Kahr
1. Bart Kahr is in the Department of Chemistry and the Molecular Design Institute, New York University, New York, New York 10003, USA.
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Molecules are said to be chiral if their geometry takes two forms that are non-superimposable mirror images of each other, manifesting in differences that can be observed in chemical and physical experiments. In 1890, Swiss chemist Philippe-Auguste Guye first posed the question: are some molecules more chiral than others¹? Chemists have since felt a recurrent itch to quantify the degree of chirality — to establish how much a chiral compound differs from its mirror image, and to determine how this measure relates to experiments². In this spirit, writing in Nature, Kumar et al.³ report that the geometry of twisted bow-tie-shaped particles can be tuned continuously, and can be characterized using a chirality index that points to possible applications in remote sensing.

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Nature 615, 395-396 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00705-x

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