Advances and Prospects of Chiral Plasmonic Nanomaterials in Emerging Applications

Chiral plasmonic nanostructures have emerged as a distinctive class of optical materials that combine nanoscale structural asymmetry with strong light-matter interactions, enabling pronounced and tunable chiroptical responses. Advances in structural engineering and plasmonic coupling have enabled diverse architectures with potential applications in enantioselective sensing, asymmetric catalysis, bioimaging, and therapeutic technologies. However, their broader development remains constrained by several key challenges, including precise control over nanoscale chirality, batch-to-batch structural reproducibility, incomplete understanding of structure-chiroptical property relationships, scalable fabrication, and stability under practical and biological conditions. This review systematically examines the major structural architectures of chiral plasmonic nanomaterials and the mechanisms responsible for chirality generation, including ligand-induced, intrinsic geometric, and assembly induced chirality. Particular emphasis is placed on correlating structural design, plasmonic coupling, and chiroptical properties with functional performance. Recent advances in enantioselective recognition and sensing, catalytic transformations, and biomedical applications are critically discussed, together with their current limitations. Finally, emerging design strategies and future opportunities for improving structural precision, reproducibility, scalability, and practical translation are highlighted, providing a framework for the rational development of next-generation chiral plasmonic nanomaterials.