Abstract
One of the many challenges in the study of chiral nanosurfaces and nanofilms is the design of accurate and controlled nanoscale films with enantioselective activity. Controlled design of chiral nanofilms creates the opportunity to develop chiral materials with nanostructured architecture. Molecular layer deposition (MLD) is an advanced surface-engineering strategy for the preparation of hybrid inorganic-organic thin films, with a desired embedded property; in our study this is chirality. Previous attempts to grow enantioselective thin films were mostly focused on self-assembled monolayers or template-assisted synthesis, followed by removal of the chiral template. Here, we report a method to prepare chiral hybrid inorganic-organic nanoscale thin films with controlled thickness and impressive enantioselective properties. We present the use of an MLD reactor for sequenced vapor deposition to produce enantioselective thin films, by embedding the chirality of chiral building blocks into thin films. The prepared thin films demonstrate enantioselectivity of ∼20% and enantiomeric excess of up to 50%. We show that our controlled synthesis of chiral thin films generates opportunities for enantioselective coatings over various templates and 3D membranes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 10397-10404 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | ACS Nano |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 24 Sep 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 American Chemical Society.
Funding
We acknowledge the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), grant nos. 2028/17 and 2209/17, for the support. O.L.-S. would like to acknowledge the Ministry of Science, Technology & Space, Israel, for a postdoc scholarship. The authors would like to acknowledge Hagit Aviv for her help in AFM characterizations, Adi Kama for the help in He-FIB images and cross-sections, Yafit Fleger for help in HRTEM lamella cross-section preparation, and Yosef Gofer and Michal Ejgenberg for XPS measurements.
Funders | Funder number |
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Ministry of Science, Technology & Space, Israel | |
Israel Science Foundation | 2209/17, 2028/17 |
Keywords
- chirality
- enantioselectivity
- hybrid thin films
- molecular layer deposition
- sequenced vapor deposition