Chiral Lead Halide Perovskite Nanowires for Second-Order Nonlinear Optics

Hybrid organic/inorganic lead halide perovskites (LHPs) have recently emerged as extremely promising photonic materials. However, the exploration of their optical nonlinearities has been mainly focused on the third- and higher-order nonlinear optical (NLO) effects. Strong second-order NLO responses are hardly expected from ordinary LHPs due to their intrinsic centrosymmetric structures, but are highly desirable for advancing their applications in the next generation integrated photonic circuits. Here we demonstrate the fabrication of a novel noncentrosymmetric LHP material by introducing chiral amines as the organic component. The nanowires grown from this new LHP material crystallize in a noncentrosymmetric P1 space group and demonstrate highly efficient second harmonic generation (SHG) with high polarization ratios and chiroptical NLO effects. Such a chiral perovskite skeleton could provide a new platform for future engineering of optoelectronic functionalities of hybrid perovskite materials.