The goal of the association of the partners of this International Associate Laboratory is to develop methods to obtain functional chiral nano-structured systems (for various applications such as light management, sensors, chiral separation and catalysis), based on the use of room temperature process with easily achievable helical self assembled nanostructures with controlled dimensions. The proposed method is inspired from the structural diversity and controllability of self-assembled organic molecular systems and exploits their optical, mechanical, or chemical properties specific to their size and morphology.
In Nature, it is possible to find many examples of optically active nanostructures such as nucleic acids, proteins or protein assemblies with well-defined architectures and functions based on self-assemblies. Their structures and their self-assembly into macromolecular complexes directly impact their biological functions and their interactions with other molecular partners. The diversity of their morphologies and their organization has inspired the scientific community to explore their potential use in the development of nanomaterials. Several breakthroughs have reported the design of biologically inspired synthetic helical structures obtained by oligomers, polymers, foldamers and self-assembled low molecular weight molecules with controllable pitch not only to mimic nature, but also for the wide range of applications in materials sciences, in particular the biomimetic approach based on the structural diversity of self-assembled amphiphilic organic moleculesallows us to develop synthetic methods enabling the controlled preparation of artificial nano-sized architectures.
One decisive advantage of helices or twisted ribbons, compared to traditional 1D nanostructures such as nanotubes and nanowires, lies in the fact that 3D morphologies with extremely high surface to volume ratio exhibit unconventional physical properties and can be advantageously used as building blocks in functional nanodevicesdue to their helicity and periodicity that can be varied to tune the spring constant as well as their structural flexibility, the possibility for the exploitation of the chiroptical properties or the chiral local environment for the asymmetric catalysis. The helical shape is also ideal for inducing polarization effects under mechanical stress. (Here, we focus on chiral nanostructures of the order of 10 nm-1µm, in the “visible” (EM or OM) range, which allow their visualization and manipulation).
