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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]