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Title: Templated Growth of a Homochiral Thin Film Oxide
Chiral surfaces are of growing interest for enantioselective adsorption and reactions. While metal surfaces can be prepared with a wide range of chiral surface orientations, chiral oxide surface preparation is much more challenging. Herein, we demonstrate that the chirality of a metal surface can be used to direct the homochiral growth of a thin film chiral oxide. Specifically, we study the chiral ‘29’ copper oxide, formed by oxidizing a Cu(111) single crystal at 650 K. Surface structure spread single crystals which expose a continuous distribution of surface orientations as a function of position on the crystal, enabled us to systematically investigate the mechanism of chirality transfer between metal and oxide with high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy. We discovered that the local underlying metal facet directs the orientation and chirality of the oxide overlayer. Importantly, single homochiral domains of the ‘29’ oxide were found in areas where the Cu step edges that templated growth were ≤20 nm apart. We used this information to select a Cu(239 241 246) oriented single crystal and demonstrate that a ‘29’ oxide surface can be grown in homochiral domains by templating from the subtle chirality of the underlying metal crystal. This work demonstrates how a small degree of chirality induced by very slight misorientation of a metal surface (~1 sites/ 20 nm2) can be amplified by oxidation to yield a homochiral oxide with a regular array of chiral oxide pores (~75 sites/ 20 nm2). This offers a general approach for making chiral oxide surfaces via oxidation of an appropriately miscut metal surface.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1764270 1653561
NSF-PAR ID:
10142139
Author(s) / Creator(s):
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Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACS Nano
ISSN:
1936-0851
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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