Bottom-up assembled chiral meta-molecules

Inspired by chiral molecular structures, scientists are developing strategies to build artificial chiral materials by mimicking natural molecular structures using functional materials. Specifically, metal nanomaterials exhibit tailorable optical properties upon excitation of surface plasmons and become one of the most promising components to realize chiral optical metamaterials. New work provides a macroscopic model to understand the origin of chirality because the structures of the chiral meta-molecules are observable under a microscope and also the optical chirality is several orders of magnitude stronger than the intrinsic chirality of organic molecules.