Helical Graphitic Carbon Nitrides with Photocatalytic and Optical Activities

Abstract

Graphitic carbon nitride can be imprinted with a twisted hexagonal rod‐like morphology by a nanocasting technique using chiral silicon dioxides as templates. The helical nanoarchitectures promote charge separation and mass transfer of carbon nitride semiconductors, enabling it to act as a more efficient photocatalyst for water splitting and CO 2 reduction than the pristine carbon nitride polymer. This is to our knowledge a unique example of chiral graphitic carbon nitride that features both left‐ and right‐handed helical nanostructures and exhibits unique optical activity to circularly polarized light at the semiconductor absorption edge as well as photoredox activity for solar‐to‐chemical conversion. Such helical nanostructured polymeric semiconductors are envisaged to hold great promise for a range of applications that rely on such semiconductor properties as well as chirality for photocatalysis, asymmetric catalysis, chiral recognition, nanotechnology, and chemical sensing.