Chiral Luminescent Materials
Why chirality matters
Molecules that exist in left‑ and right‑handed forms—so‑called chiral species—interact with light in ways that their mirror images do not. When this handedness is transferred to a luminescent material, the emitted light can acquire a preferred circular polarization. That subtle control over the spin of photons opens up new possibilities for sensing, secure optical communication, and emerging quantum‑optical technologies. Our central question is straightforward: how can we deliberately embed chirality into highly emissive materials so that the resulting optical response is both strong and predictable?
Combining the best of two worlds
Organic molecules offer unrivaled synthetic flexibility. By attaching chiral groups to a fluorescent core we can tailor solubility, stability, and emission wavelength with relative ease. However, in many purely organic systems the chiral influence on luminescence is modest; the circular polarization of the emitted light is often too weak for practical use. Hybrid perovskites, in contrast, are crystalline materials that blend an inorganic framework with organic cations. Their lattices can adopt chiral space groups, and they are already known for high photoluminescence quantum yields and good charge transport. By introducing chiral organic components into the perovskite structure we obtain a material that retains the strong emission of the inorganic lattice while gaining the structural tunability of organic chemistry. In our laboratory we therefore pursue two complementary pathways: studying chiral organic emitters that can be processed into thin films or nanoparticles, and incorporating chiral ligands into hybrid perovskite crystals so that the crystal symmetry itself is handed. Both strategies aim to amplify the chiral signature in the emitted light while preserving, or even enhancing, overall luminescence efficiency.
How we investigate chiral luminescence
Understanding the connection between structure and optical response requires a suite of spectroscopic tools, each probing a different aspect of the photophysics. Circularly polarized photoluminescence (CP‑PL) provides a direct measure of the degree of circular polarization—often expressed as the g‑factor—of the emitted light. Time‑resolved circular dichroism (TR‑CD) follows how chiral absorption evolves after a short pump pulse, linking structural dynamics to the observed optical activity. Magneto‑optical Kerr spectroscopy examines the interaction of spin‑polarized carriers with light, offering insight into spin‑selective pathways that may be enhanced by chirality. Ultrafast pump‑probe and transient absorption experiments track carrier relaxation, exciton formation, and recombination on femtosecond to nanosecond timescales, revealing whether chirality influences the fundamental charge‑carrier dynamics. All of these measurements are complemented by structural characterization—single‑crystal X‑ray diffraction and grazing‑incidence X‑ray scattering—so that we can directly correlate a material’s atomic arrangement with its optical behavior.
Join us
Our group welcomes graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and collaborators who are interested in the intersection of chemistry, materials science, and optics. We work in a collaborative environment that brings together material science and ultrafast spectroscopy.
“When the structure of a material is chiral, the light it emits can be chiral too. Understanding and controlling that relationship is the heart of our work.”
