A review article entitled “Circularly Polarized Light-Driven Supramolecular Chirality” by Jun Su Kang, Namhee Kim, Teahyung Kim, Myungeun Seo, and Byeong-Su Kim was published in Macromolecular Rapid Communications. We wrote this review with the Byeong-Su Kim group at Yonsei University.

Homochirality is one of the unique features of living organisms on earth. Chirality appears across multiple length scales in nature, indicating that asymmetry induced at a molecular level is amplified into supramolecular and macroscopic levels. While the origin of asymmetry remains a mystery, circularly polarized light (CPL) has been considered as a possible source of symmetry breaking as an inherently chiral entity with left- and right-handedness.

Here we review how supramolecular chirality can evolve in self-assembling and polymeric systems upon CPL irradiation. Our discussion starts with asymmetric photochemical reactions that occur because of different extinction coefficients of mirror-imaged isomers to CPL, i.e., the anisotropy g factor. Based on the enantiomerization barrier of the building block and the association process into supramolecular objects, we clarify different mechanisms for the photon-to-matter chirality transfer including stereoregular packing/polymerization, photoderacemization, and asymmetric photodestruction/production.

The review article is available in the following link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/marc.202100649.

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