Asymmetric misfit nanotubes: Chemical affinity outwits the entropy at high-temperature solid-state reactions
M. B. Sreedhara, Simón Hettler, Ifat Kaplan‐Ashiri, Katya Rechav, Yishay Feldman, Andrey N. Enyashin, Lothar Houben, Raúl Arenal, Reshef Tenne
Abstract
Significance Materials with the absence of inversion symmetry are fundamentally interesting. The synthesis of such asymmetric structures remains a critical challenge in material science. Despite the large interest in Janus nanotubes, no report of synthesized nanotubes with asymmetric structure has been published. Here, we demonstrate a successful synthesis of a family of asymmetric misfit nanotubes LaS-Ta(S,Se) 2 and LaS-(TaSe 2 ) 2 and flakes, in which Se atoms exclusively bind to Ta and La atoms bind to S. Theoretical calculations show that these materials possess very high electrical dipoles compared to simple Janus SeMoS layers. The lack of inversion and time-reversal symmetry in chiral asymmetric nanotubes can induce nonlinear physical properties such as bulk photovoltaics, superconducting Little–Parks oscillations, chiral selective photosynthesis, and so on.