A light-driven three-dimensional plasmonic nanosystem that translates molecular motion into reversible chiroptical function

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel light-driven plasmonic nanosystem that amplifies molecular motion and translates it into reversible chiroptical signals, enabling potential applications in all-optical molecular devices.

Contribution

The authors develop a 3D plasmonic nanosystem that converts molecular motion into reversible chiroptical functions, bridging the gap between nanoscale molecular machines and larger, functional nanostructures.

Findings

Amplifies azobenzene molecular motion via nanostructure

Achieves reversible large-amplitude chiroptical modulation

Utilizes light as energy source and information probe

Abstract

Nature has developed striking light-powered proteins such as bacteriorhodopsin, which can convert light energy into conformational changes for biological functions. Such natural machines are a great source of inspiration for creation of their synthetic analogues. However, synthetic molecular machines typically operate at the nanometre scale or below. Translating controlled operation of individual molecular machines to a larger dimension, for example, to 10-100 nm, which features many practical applications, is highly important but remains challenging. Here we demonstrate a light-driven plasmonic nanosystem that can amplify the molecular motion of azobenzene through the host nanostructure and consequently translate it into reversible chiroptical function with large amplitude modulation. Light is exploited as both energy source and information probe. Our plasmonic nanosystem bears unique features of optical addressability, reversibility and modulability, which are crucial for developing all-optical molecular devices with desired functionalities.