supramolecular chirality induction : toward new hybrid chiroptical nano-objects

The polarization of light, despite being known since long time, is recently at the center of renewed interest. More and more high technology companies in the fields of safety and information transmission are starting to exploit this property. One bottleneck for their use comes from the limitation in the light transmission of current methods of polarization (typically up to 45%). In order to overpass this physical limitation, one possible approach would be to use fluorescent materials emitting polarized light. However, the synthesis and purification of such materials is complex and obtaining both enantiomers is not always possible. The current work focus on a new synthetic pathway, possibly simpler and more versatile, using chiral hybrid or inorganic nano-helices and organic fluorophores interacting together. The aggregation of chromophores around the template will form chiral fluorescent nano-objects. The first chapter explains how chirality is present in many fields and at every scale, from molecules to daily objects. We will discuss the way of inducting or transferring chirality. The second facet of this work, light-matter interactions, will also be explained, concerning both absorption and emission of light, but also on how molecular assembly can affect these properties. We will study into detail the very particular case of circular dichroism and circularly polarized luminescence. Finally, we will see the existing systems that are used to obtain these properties and the drawback of these materials. In this work, we chose to use two systems. The first, constituted of organic nano-helices in a silica shell, has the advantage of using the organic template confined in chiral nano-space to induce chirality to the organic chromophores in interaction with them molecularly, but also through aggregation due to the confinement. The disadvantage being that this system is not robust toward environmental changes. The alternative approach is to use the silica shell as an inorganic template for the covalent grafting of fluorophores onto its surface. In the second chapter, the method for the synthesis of nano-structures is described, along with an explanation on the choice and synthesis of the chromophores used in this study. Finally, the characterization processes used are detailed. The third chapter will focus on the results we obtained when integrating achiral chromophores into hybrid helices or by grafting then onto the silica surface. We will see the importance of the intermolecular assembly and of the interaction with a chiral environment to obtain circular dichroism and circularly polarized luminescence through chiral induction. Various fluorophores are presented and compared allowing the understanding of the key parameters for chirality induction of each type of structure.In the last chapter, more complex systems are studied using molecules presenting chiroptical properties in solution state or having the ability to form self-assemblies showing such properties. The objective will be to tune the chiroptical properties of these chromophores, by the use of hybrid helices to force a specific organization. The last part will focus on the synthesis of fluorescent carbon based quantum dots using hybrid structures. These quantum dots, can retain the shape of the original structure and show circular dichroism or circularly polarized luminescence without needing to form a complex with an external source of molecular chirality.