Hysteresis Nanoarchitectonics with Chiral Gel Fibers and Achiral Gold Nanospheres for Reversible Chiral Inversion

Intelligent control over the handedness of circular dichroism (CD) is of special significance in self-organized biological and artificial systems. Herein, we report a chiral organic molecule (R1) containing a disulfide unit self-assembles into M-type helical fibers gels, which undergoes chirality inversion by incorporating gold nanospheres due to the formation of Au−S bonds between R1 and gold nanospheres. Upon heating at 80 °C, the aggregation of gold nanospheres results in a disappearance of the Au−S bond, allowing the reversible switching back to M-type helical fibers. The original chirality of M-type fibers could also be retained by adding anisotropic gold nanorods. A series of characterization methods, involving CD, Raman, Infrared spectroscopy, electric microscopy, and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) measurements were used to investigate the mechanism of chiral evolutions. Our results provide a facile way of fabricating hysteresis nanoarchitectonics to achieve dynamic supramolecular chirality using inorganic metallic nanoparticles.