Endowing inorganic nanomaterials with circularly polarized luminescence

Abstract Recently, materials with circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) properties have attracted substantial attention because they offer new perspectives in fundamental research and wide applications in photonics, bio‐encoding, catalysis, and so forth. Such importance has recently promoted the development of CPL‐active materials from the traditional realm of organics to newly released areas in inorganics. Due to the advantages of inorganic nanomaterials in stability, high luminescent quantum efficiency, material diversity, and the diversity of shapes and sizes, extensive research about CPL active inorganic nanomaterials has been done in the past decades leading to great signs of progress on synthesis, characterizations, and potential applications. In this review, therefore, we will thoroughly describe the general design principles of inorganic nanomaterials with CPL activity, basically according to the origins of chirality in inorganic nanomaterials: intrinsic chirality in inorganic nanomaterials, ligand‐induced chirality, and structural chirality caused by the supramolecular assembly, respectively. The representative applications of the CPL‐active inorganic nanomaterials are presented with respect to challenges, prospective, and problems that unsolved to date.