Cao Zetan, He Jia, Liu Zhiwen, Zhang Haoran, Chen Bin
Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
ACS Nano. 2021 Oct 26;15(10):16255-16265. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.1c05243. Epub 2021 Sep 23.
Chirality involved reactions enable to probe features in the fields of asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, which allow to gain insight into the fundamental mechanisms of topochemically controlled reactions. However, observation of the chirality-associated reaction dynamics with simultaneous structural determination of microscopic features has been lacking. Here, we report the direct visualization of the electron-beam-stimulated reaction dynamics of HgS nanostructures with chiral and achiral morphologies simultaneously in both real and reciprocal space. Under the electron-beam excitation of HgS nanostructures, the formation and evaporation dynamics of Hg nanodroplets were vividly pictured, while the reciprocal space imaging revealed the structural transformation from monocrystalline to polycrystalline. Interestingly, such induced changes were size dependent, which were slowed when involving the chirality in the nanostructures. The finding offers a fundamental understanding of topochemically controlled reaction mechanisms and holds promise of tuning asymmetric synthesis for catalysis-related applications.
