Harnessing chirality in hybrid semiconductors

Hybrid organic/inorganic semiconductors (HOIS) offer tremendous opportunities to control fundamental properties that underpin energy technologies. While currently there are enormous worldwide efforts exploring, exploiting and improving a narrow class of HOIS (lead-halide perovskites, such as methylammonium lead iodide), primarily for photovoltaic (PV) applications, there are opportunities to transcend this initial focus on PV research and seek deeper understanding and control of their fundamental properties. Inherent in these unique hybrid systems is the dichotomy between organic/molecular moieties (quantum chemistry) and inorganic/extended systems (solid state physics). As a result, they exhibit properties that are not solely a juxtaposition of the inorganic and organic sub-units, but are instead truly emergent phenomena, with the concomitant ability to control and design new properties by judicious choice of inorganic and organic components. This presentation will focus on efforts to control and manipulate the spin degree of freedom in these HOIS systems. The presentation will focus on collaborative work in the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy center in examining chiral induced spin selectivity (CISS) in hybrid semiconductor systems. Specifically, recent basic material observations in chiral hybrid systems will be discussed along with demonstrations of harnessing CISS as a functional material property and a new class of spintronic materials.