Small symmetry-breaking triggering large chiroptical responses of Ag70 nanoclusters

Abstract The origins of the chiroptical activities of inorganic nanostructures have perplexed scientists, and deracemization of high-nuclearity metal nanoclusters (NCs) remains challenging. Here, we report a single-crystal structure of Rac - Ag 70 that contains enantiomeric pairs of 70-nuclearity silver clusters with 20 free valence electrons ( Ag 70 ), and each of these clusters is a doubly truncated tetrahedron with pseudo- T symmetry. A deracemization method using a chiral metal precursor not only stabilizes Ag 70 in solution but also enables monitoring of the gradual enlargement of the electronic circular dichroism (CD) responses and anisotropy factor g abs . The chiral crystals of R/S - Ag 70 in space group P 2 1 containing a pseudo- T -symmetric enantiomeric NC show significant kernel-based and shell-based CD responses. The small symmetry breaking of T d symmetry arising from local distortion of Ag−S motifs and rotation of the apical Ag 3 trigons results in large chiroptical responses. This work opens an avenue to construct chiral medium/large-sized NCs and nanoparticles, which are promising for asymmetric catalysis, nonlinear optics, chiral sensing, and biomedicine.