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Updated: May 10, 2026

Construction and Operation of a Light-driven Gold Nanorod Rotary Motor System
Published on: June 30, 2018
Chiral diffusion of rotary nanomotors
Amir Nourhani1, Paul E Lammert, Ali Borhan
1Department of Chemical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
Abstract:
Neither a purely deterministic rotary nanomotor nor a purely orientational diffuser exhibits long-term translational motion, but coupling rotation to orientational diffusion yields translational diffusion. We demonstrate that this effective translational diffusion can easily dominate the ordinary thermal translational diffusion for experimentally relevant nanomotors, and that this effective diffusion is chiral. Unpowered chiral particles do not exhibit chiral diffusion, but a nanorotor has both handedness and an instantaneous direction of powered motion, thus-unlike an unpowered particle-its diffusional motion can distinguish left from right.
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