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jacquelyn sauriol's avatar

When you put it as simply as possible, it's pretty easy to understand. It's easy to see why they are doing this, because they can do it. No other reason is needed.

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OUTRAGED HUMAN's avatar

inorganic quantum dots, perovskite nanocrystals, and upconversion nanoparticles, have been employed for the design and synthesis of novel chiral luminescent nanomaterials, which could find important applications in biological science, 3D display, information encryption, chiral spintronics, and enantioselective photochemistry.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-022-00913-6

Conclusions and perspectives

Chiral soft templates provide a powerful and straightforward bottom-up self-assembly strategy for the design and synthesis of chiral nanomaterials with hierarchical architectures and advanced functionalities. Compared to emerging DNA-based soft templates, chiral liquid-crystalline templates are faster, less expensive, and more adaptable to guide the self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks into arbitrary and high-order chiral nanomaterials over a larger range of scales, thanks to their inherent long-range ordered molecular arrangements that combine the liquid fluidity with crystal ordering from atomic-molecular to macroscopic levels. In this review, we offer an account of the state-of-the-art advances on liquid crystal-templated chiral functional nanomaterials, including chiral plasmonic nanomaterials and chiral luminescent nanomaterials. Different thermotropic and lyotropic liquid crystal templates have been applied for fabricating chiral plasmonic nanomaterials with enhanced CD, amplified dissymmetry factor, and dynamic chiroptical responses, which are of paramount significance for many potential applications, such as negative-refractive-index materials, ultrasensitive biosensing, enantioselective analysis, advanced light-polarization filters, and beyond. A variety of emerging nanoscale functional building blocks, such as inorganic quantum dots, perovskite nanocrystals, and upconversion nanoparticles, have been employed for the design and synthesis of novel chiral luminescent nanomaterials exhibiting significantly enhanced circularly polarized luminescence, which could find important applications in many emerging fields, such as biological science, 3D display, information encryption, chiral spintronics, and enantioselective photochemistry.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00315/full

Liquid crystals (LCs) form a fascinating class of soft materials exhibiting a plethora of mesophases between the isotropic liquid and the crystal phases. Being discovered in the end of the 19th century [1], LCs made inroads into optical display technologies in the second half of the 20th century [2].

Among the most interesting liquid-crystalline phases for applications in optics and photonics are the so-called blue phases (BPs). These phases are inherently present in some strongly chiral LCs and only within a narrow temperature range (in most cases from 1 to 3 K) between the isotropic (I) and chiral nematic (N*) phases. Three such phases have been identified, denoted as blue phase III (BPIII), blue phase II (BPII), and blue phase I (BPI), upon reducing temperature.

Spherical quantum dots and nanoparticles, as well as anisotropic nanosheets, have been tested as stabilization agents. In this study, we have shown that small spherical QDs, surface-functionalized with flexible molecules, extend the total blue phase range of CE8 and strongly increase the stability of BPIII. The outcomes of this work have been compared to other studies on QDs and other spherical and anisotropic NPs. The role of chemistry is very important since even moderate changes in the core composition and surface functionalization [56] have a noticeable impact on the stabilization effect. The results obtained so far have revealed certain trends, as well as the key mechanisms behind the BP stabilization.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352940720302882

Abstract

Liquid crystal (LC) nanoscience has been witnessing a paradigm shift towards the dispersion of Cadmium (Cd) based quantum dots (QDs) into LCs to enhance their electro-optical properties and produce highly efficient tunable electro-optical devices. However, the severe toxicity of Cd based QDs impedes their technological impact on the LC based tunable electro-optical devices and hence demands for the usage of Cd-free QDs. Here, we present a critical review on recent accomplishments and insights in the Cd-free QDs doped LC nanocomposites. The investigations on these nanocomposites have clearly demonstrated that the core/shell structure QDs (CIS/ZnS, InP/ZnS and Co-ZnO/ZnO), ZnO and ZnS based QDs, Carbon Dots, and perovskite-quantum dots possess the strong potentials to greatly modulate the properties of LCs and hence could be used as alternative eco-friendly dopants.

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