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Chirality in Nature

Chirality in Nature

Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid.

Chirality

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 13, 2025

Scalable Nanohelices for Predictive Studies and Enhanced 3D Visualization

Scalable Nanohelices for Predictive Studies and Enhanced 3D Visualization

Published on: November 12, 2014

Large-Area Metallic Nanohelices for Engineering Optical Chirality.

Thu Hac Huong Le¹, Hisako Sato², Takuo Tanaka³

¹Department of Electronics & Manufacturing, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8564, Japan.

Small (Weinheim an Der Bergstrasse, Germany)

|July 28, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Researchers developed a scalable self-assembly method to create large metallic helices. This technique enables precise control over structure and facilitates detailed chiroptical property characterization for advanced applications.

Keywords:

3D nanostructure chiral metamaterials metallic nanohelix optical chirality stress‐driven 3D fabrication

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Area of Science:

Nanotechnology
Materials Science
Plasmonics

Background:

Submicrometer helical structures exhibit unique properties due to their twisting nature.
Current fabrication methods are limited to small sample sizes, restricting research and applications.

Purpose of the Study:

To present a scalable self-assembly method for fabricating metallic helices.
To enable precise control over helical structure parameters.
To facilitate comprehensive characterization of chiroptical properties.

Main Methods:

Fabrication of metallic helices via self-assembly from planar microstrips released from a substrate.
Exploitation of nanoscale residual stress and gradient strains for spontaneous folding and twisting.
Characterization of chiroptical properties using standard spectrometers and numerical simulations.

Main Results:

Successful large-scale production of centimeter-scale metallic helices.
Demonstration of pronounced chiroptical responses in the mid- and near-infrared regions.
Clarification of geometric factors influencing chiral eigenmode excitation.

Conclusions:

The developed method offers a straightforward framework for designing tailored metallic helices as chiral plasmonic structures.
This advancement has potential implications for photonics, stereochemistry, and chiroptical spectroscopy.
Enables fabrication of helical and 3D nanostructures for diverse scientific fields.