Synthesis of Ligand-Induced Chiral Tellurium Nanocrystals

Chiral tellurium nanoparticles have recently garnered tremendous attention as emerging inorganic nanomaterials with intrinsically chiral space groups owing to their potential in next-generation stereosynthesis, spintronics, and optoelectronics. Inspired by the chiral ligand-mediated synthetic strategy, we herein present hydrothermal-assisted synthesis of chiral polyhedral tellurium nanoparticles that provides differed chirogenesis than that of particles fabricated by wet chemistry in recent studies; the thiolated cysteine molecules change the morphology of tellurium nanoparticles from fundamental two-dimensional shapes to chiral three-dimensional polyhedra owing to the screw dislocation effects observed only during nanoparticle growth. However, the nanoparticles do not exhibit chiral behaviors at the nucleation stage. Further investigation indicates that the growth of chiral polyhedral tellurium nanoparticles is overwhelmingly affected by parameters such as the hydrothermal reaction time, amount of polyvinylpyrrolidone, and species of chiral molecules. We believe that these findings can provide new insights into the fundamental relationships among structural chirality, chiral ligands, screw dislocations, and chiral space groups in principle.