Spontaneous Transmission of Chirality through Multiple Length Scales

The hierarchical transfer of chirality in nature, from the nano-, to meso-, to macroscopic length scales, is very complex, and as of yet, not well understood. The advent of scanning probes has allowed chirality to be monitored at the single molecule or monolayer level and has opened up the possibility to track enantiospecific interactions and chiral self-assembly with molecular-scale detail. This paper describes the self-assembly of a simple, model molecule (naphtho[2,3-a] pyrene) that is achiral in the gas phase, but becomes chiral when adsorbed on a surface. This polyaromatic hydrocarbon forms a stable and reversibly ordered system on Cu(111) in which the transmission of chirality from single surface-bound molecules to complex 2D chiral architectures can be monitored as a function of molecular packing density and surface temperature. In addition to the point chirality of the surface-bound molecule, the unit cell of the molecular domains was also found to be chiral due to the incommensurate alignment of the molecular rows with respect to the underlying metal lattice. These molecular domains always aggregated in groups of three, all of the same chirality, but with different rotational orientations, forming homochiral "tri-lobe" ensembles. At a larger length scale, these tri-lobe ensembles associated with nearest-neighbor tri-lobe units of opposite chirality at lower packing densities before forming an extended array of homochiral tri-lobe ensembles at higher converges. This system displayed chirality at a variety of size scales from the molecular (approximate to 1 nm) and domain (approximate to 5 nm) to the tri-lobe ensemble (approximate to 10 nm) and extended array (>25 nm) levels. The chirality of the tri-lobe ensembles dictated how the overall surface packing occurred and both homo-and heterochiral arrays could be reproducibly and reversibly formed and interchanged as a function of surface coverage. Finally, these chirally templated surfaces displayed remarkable enantiospecificity for naphtho[ 2,3-a]pyrene molecules adsorbed in the second layer. Given its simplicity, reversibility, and rich degree of order, this system represents an ideal test bed for the investigation of symmetry breaking and the hierarchical transmission of chirality through multiple length scales.