Exploration of Chiral Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Semiconducting Lead Halides.

Organic-inorganic lead halides have recently emerged as promising alternatives to conventional optoelectronic materials, considering their intriguing physical properties. However, organic-inorganic lead halides featuring chirality are seldom explored. Here, a pair of enantiomorphic organic-inorganic hybrid semiconducting lead halides, (R-C5 H14 N2 )PbBr4 (1R) and (S-C5 H14 N2 )PbBr4 (2S), were successfully obtained with the templating of chiral amines. These compounds adopt distinct one-dimensional infinite quantum helices formed by edge-shared transformative lead bromide octahedra. Notably, 1R and 2S present mirror circular dichroism (CD) signals due to the chirality transfer of the enantiopure amines. Furthermore, 1R and 2S exhibit phase-matchable quadratic nonlinear response and typical semiconducting behaviours. This work highlights the potential of lead halides as a new kind of chiral semiconducting materials in spintronic and chiral optical applications.