The fabrication of chiral self-assemblies, no matter from chiral building blocks or achiral ones, has been widely investigated and is still of great interest nowadays. STM has been proven to be a powerful tool for the understanding of chiral effects at molecular level. In our experiments, we found that deposition of achiral DBA solution on hot substrate can produce large scale high density patterns. The introduction of small amounts of chiral DBA led to the formation of homochiral surface, surprisingly without the presence of chiral DBA on surface. With increasing molar ratio of chiral molecules, morphological transformation from high density pattern to porous pattern was observed. Moreover, the surface chirality was inversed. All these findings can be ascribed to the relative poor stability of the chiral molecules on surface at high temperature. The chiral molecules were found capable of inducing homochiral self-assemblies with opposite handedness.

Induction of chirality in an achiral monolayer at the liquid/solid interface: Temperature and concentration effects

247th National Meeting (2014)

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