INS12-1572
Chiral Self-Assembled Soft Materials as Physically Unclonable Functions for Sustainable Secure Electronics
Topic
S12. Women in Renewable Energy and Sustainability (WiRES) 2026
When and Where
Sep 30, 2026
15:25 - 15:50
Room 204
Session Chairs
Annalisa BRUNO
Presenter(s)
Eunji Lee (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology)
Co-Author(s)
Abstract
Hardware security and anti-counterfeiting increasingly demand unclonable identifiers for distributed electronics, edge devices, and product authentication, yet conventional physically unclonable functions (PUFs) depend on energy-intensive top-down lithography. We show that the intrinsic randomness of chiral supramolecular self-assembly offers a solution-processable alternative, in which molecular handedness becomes a stochastic entropy source read out across multiple channels. At the core, room-temperature crystallization-driven self-assembly (CDSA) organizes conjugated-polymer block copolymers into P- and M-helical nanowires whose long-range chirality governs a circularly polarized light (CPL)-selective optical response. To translate this chiroptical selectivity into a device signal, the helical nanowires are co-assembled with metal-halide perovskite quantum dots, where interfacial charge transfer amplifies the dissymmetry and produces handedness-dependent photocurrents in phototransistors for CPL-responsive authentication. To make the encoded identity nonvolatile and electrically addressable, the same helices, here templated by renewable plant-derived limonene, are interpenetrated with a ferroelectric fluoropolymer, so that interfacial dipolar coupling transcribes supramolecular helicity into remanent polarization and yields CPL-addressable ferroelectric PUFs with 256-bit identifiers and near-ideal bit uniformity. Extending the principle beyond conjugated polymers, bio-derived homochiral and heterochiral peptides confine and direct the shape-controlled growth of plasmonic gold nanoparticles, adding a surface-enhanced Raman channel whose signature is set by helical handedness and particle shape. Together, they trace one design logic, chirality as a solution-processable entropy source drawn in part from renewable building blocks and decoded optically, electrically, and plasmonically, pointing toward more sustainable secure electronics.
