Chiral emission from chirotopic nanostructures

Yawei Wu; Zhenyu Wang; Zihan Wu; Jiahui Xu; Chenlu He; Shuqing He; Ruize Wang; Mingsheng Gao; Qing Zhang; Chaowei Wang; Jincheng Ni; Zhipeng Li; Yiming Wu; Jiaru Chu; Dong Wu; Xiaogang Liu; Yang Chen

doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74088-8

Chiral emission from chirotopic nanostructures

Nat Commun. 2026 Jun 5. doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-74088-8. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Yawei Wu^#^{1

2}, Zhenyu Wang^#¹, Zihan Wu^#¹, Jiahui Xu³, Chenlu He⁴, Shuqing He⁵, Ruize Wang¹, Mingsheng Gao⁶, Qing Zhang⁶, Chaowei Wang¹, Jincheng Ni¹, Zhipeng Li⁷, Yiming Wu⁸, Jiaru Chu¹, Dong Wu¹, Xiaogang Liu⁹, Yang Chen^{10

11}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
² Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China.
³ Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
⁴ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
⁵ College of Health Science and Environmental Engineering, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, China.
⁶ School of Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
⁷ Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, People's Republic of China.
⁸ Institute of Flexible Electronics (IFE, Future Technologies), Xiang'an Campus, Xiamen University, Xiang'an South Road, Xiamen, Fujian, China.
⁹ Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. chmlx@nus.edu.sg.
¹⁰ Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. cyang_phys@ustc.edu.cn.
¹¹ State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Hefei, China. cyang_phys@ustc.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 42248862
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-74088-8

Abstract

Mirror asymmetry of electronic states or optical media is expected for the emission of chiral photons, which constrains the design of dichroic materials. Here we demonstrate that these symmetry restrictions can be relaxed by harnessing the local chirality of globally achiral materials, also known as chirotopicity. Unlike chirotopic sites in molecules whose optical effects are unknown, photonic nanostructures make possible the enhancement and deliberate localization of left- and right-handed chirotopic fields by linearly polarized light. We show that intense and highly elliptic light is emitted from achiral luminophores engulfed by such fields. Luminescence dissymmetry factors between 1.65 and -1.58, approaching the theoretical limit, are obtained for nanoparticles and dyes, which may be generalized to other luminophores. After being hypothesized by Mislow more than 50 years ago, these findings validate the concept of chirotopicity and enable its utilization in chiral photonics.