Chiral inorganic materials have attracted great attention owning to their unique physical and chemical properties attributed to the symmetry-breaking of their nanostructures. Chiral inorganic materials can be endowed with chiral geometric configurations from achiral space group crystals through lattice twisting, screw dislocations or hierarchical self-assembled spiral morphologies, showing various characteristic chiral anisotropy. However, the multilevel chirality in chiral nickel molybdate films (CNMFs) remains to be elaborately excavated. In this paper, we report three hierarchical levels of chirality in CNMFs, spanning from the atomic to the micron scale, including primary helically coiled nanoflakes with twisted atomic crystal lattices, secondary helical stacking of layered nanoflakes, and tertiary asymmetric morphology between adjacent nanoparticles. Our findings may enrich the chiral self-assembly structural types and provide valuable insights for the comprehensive analysis path of hierarchical chiral crystals.

Spin chiral anisotropy (SChA) refers to the occurrence of different spin polarization in antipodal chiral structures. Herein, we report the SChA in diamagnetic chiral mesostructured In₂O₃ films (CMIFs) with manifestation of chirality-dependent magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) signals. CMIFs were grown on fluorine-doped tin dioxide conductive glass (FTO) substrates, which were synthesized via a hydrothermal route, with malic acid used as the symmetry-breaking agent. Two levels of chirality have been identified in CMIFs: primary nanoflakes with atomically twisted crystal lattices and secondary helical stacking of the nanoflakes. CMIFs exhibit chirality-dependent asymmetric MCD signals due to the different interactions of chirality-induced effective magnetic field and external magnetic field, which distinguish from the commonly observed external magnetic field-dependent symmetric MCD signals. These findings provide insights into spin manipulation of spin-paired diamagnets.

Hematite (α-Fe₂O₃) is known to undergo conversion from weak ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic as the temperature decreases below the Morin temperature (T_M = 250 K) due to spin moment rotation occurring during the Morin transition (MT). Herein, we endowed hematite with mesostructured chirality to maintain weak ferromagnetism without MT. Chiral mesostructured hematite (CMH) nanoparticles were prepared by a hydrothermal method with glutamic acid (Glu) as the symmetry-breaking agent. The triangular bipyramidal CMH nanoparticles were composed of helically cleaved nanoflakes with twisted crystal lattice. Field-cooled (FC) magnetization measurements showed that the magnetic moments of CMH were stabilized without MT within the temperature range of 10–300 K. Hysteresis loop measurements confirmed the weak ferromagnetism of CMH. The enhanced Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) was speculated to be responsible for the temperature-independent weak ferromagnetism, in which the spin configuration would be confined with canted antiferromagnetic coupling due to the mesostructured chirality of CMH.

Chiral quantum dot (in rod)-light-emitting diodes (CQLEDs) with circularly polarized electroluminescence (CPEL) have driven interest in the future display, communication, and storage industries. However, the preparation of CQLEDs is still a challenging unresolved. Herein, we fabricated CQLEDs through spin-coating evaporation of chiral CdSe/CdS quantum rods (CCCQs) colloidal solution on indium tin oxide substrate. The CCCQs were synthesized via an isotropically epitaxial growth with cholic acid as the symmetry breaking agent, which induced one-direction chiral dislocation around the c axis of their hexagonal crystal structure. The CCCQs were ranked side-by-side in right-handed chiral arrangement with helical axis perpendicular to substrate due to chiral driving force of the cholic acid arrangement. The CQLEDs exhibited a negative CPEL signal at 600 nm with a |g_EL| of 2 × 10⁻⁴, which is ascribable to the selective filtration on emission arising from the circular Bragg resonance by quasi-photonic crystal structures.

Chirality is an indispensable integral of biological system. As an important part of organisms, chiral organic structure of bone has been extensively investigated. However, the chirality of bone minerals is unclear and not fully determined. Here, we report nine levels of fractal-like chirality of bone minerals by combining electron microscopic and spectrometric characterizations. The primary helically twisted acicular apatite crystals inside collagen fibrils and between fibrils merge laterally to form secondary helical subplatelets. The chiral arrangement of several subplatelets forms tertiary spiral mineral platelets. Further coherent stepwise stacking of mineral platelets with collagen fibrils leads to quaternary to ninth levels, which reconciled the previous conflicting models. The optical activities in the UV–visible, infrared and terahertz regions demonstrated chirality from atomic to macroscopic scales based on circularly selective absorption and Bragg resonance at different levels of chirality. Our findings provide new insight into the structural integrity of bone, osteology, forensic medicine and archaeology and inspire the design of novel biomaterials.

Titania has received considerable attention as a promising anode material of Li-ion battery (LIB). Controlling the structure and morphology of titania nanostructures is crucial to govern their performance. Herein, we report a mesoporous titania scaffold with a bicontinuous shifted double diamond (SDD) structure for anode material of LIB. The titania scaffold was synthesized by the cooperative self-assembly of a block copolymer poly(ethylene oxide)-block-polystyrene template and titanium diisopropoxide bis(acetylacetonate) as the inorganic precursor in a mixture solvent of tetrahydrofuran and HCl/water. The structure shows tetragonal symmetry (space group I4₁/amd) comprising two sets of diamond networks adjoining each other with the unit cell parameter of a = 90 nm and c = 127 nm, which affords the porous titania a specific surface area (SSA) of 42 m²·g⁻¹ with a mean pore diameter of 38 nm. Serving as an anode material of LIB, the bicontinuous titania scaffold exhibits a high specific capacity of 254 mAh·g⁻¹ at the current density of 1 A·g⁻¹ and an alluring self-improving feature upon charge/discharge over 1,000 cycles. This study overcomes the difficulty in building up ordered bicontinuous functional materials and demonstrates their potential in energy storage application.