Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2024 Conference (MATSUS24)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsus.2024.088
Publication date: 18th December 2023
Magic-sized clusters (MSC) are identical inorganic cores that maintain a closed-shell stability, inhibiting conventional growth processes. Because MSCs are smaller than nanoparticles, they can mimic molecular-level processes, and because of their small size and high organic-ligand/core ratio, MSCs have “softer” inter-particle interactions, with access to a richer phase diagram beyond the classical close packed structures seen with larger particles. These MSCs display a surprising ability to self-organize into films with hierarchical assembly that spans over seven orders of magnitude in length scale. The films are optically active with g-factors among the highest reported for all semiconductor particles. In this talk I will highlight some remarkable behavior we have recently found in magic sized clusters, with a focus on the symmetry breaking and chirality transfer that occurs during their self-organization into thin films. And I will discuss our method for extracting the chiroptic-CD signal from the raw data that contains highly linear anisotropic effects, derived using Mueller matrix and Stokes vector conventions, and our extension of that expression using a more accurate third order Taylor series expansion to reveal "pairwise interference" contributions to CD spectra that, unlike LDLB contributions, cannot be averaged out of the signal.