Chiral plasmonic nanostructures: Recent advances in their synthesis and applications

Abstract

Chirality describes the geometric property of an object that is not superimposable on its mirror image and has been a pivotal concept in chemistry and biology since the 19th century. Chiral plasmonics has attracted increasing attention over the past years as modern nanofabrication techniques and soft-chemistry synthesis and assembly approaches have allowed the preparation of complex and well-controlled chiral metallic nanostructures with promising applications in fields such as molecular sensing and chiral separation and synthesis, or as optical polarizing elements. This review covers the main techniques employed to construct chiral plasmonic materials, in particular using soft-chemistry approaches, and discusses some applications of these nanostructures on the basis of recent examples drawn from the literature.