Ultrafast chirality-dependent dynamics from helicity-resolved transient absorption spectroscopy

Abstract

Chirality, a pervasive phenomenon in nature, is widely studied across diverse fields including the origins of life, chemical catalysis, drug discovery, and physical optoelectronics. The investigations of natural chiral materials have been constrained by their intrinsically weak chiral effects. Recently, significant progress has been made in the fabrication and assembly of low-dimensional micro and nanoscale chiral materials and their architectures, leading to the discovery of novel optoelectronic phenomena such as circularly polarized light emission, spin and charge flip, advocating great potential for applications in quantum information, quantum computing, and biosensing. Despite these advancements, the fundamental mechanisms underlying the generation, propagation, and amplification of chirality in low-dimensional chiral materials and architectures remain largely unexplored. To tackle these challenges, we focus on employing ultrafast spectroscopy to investigate the dynamics of chirality evolution, with the aim of attaining a more profound understanding of the microscopic mechanisms governing chirality generation and amplification. This review thus provides a comprehensive overview of the chiral micro-/nano-materials, including two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), chiral halide perovskites, and chiral metasurfaces, with a particular emphasis on the physical mechanism. This review further explores the advancements made by ultrafast chiral spectroscopy research, thereby paving the way for innovative devices in chiral photonics and optoelectronics.