Magnetic optical activity, which can occur in all media and is induced by longitudinal magnetic field, causes the difference in absorption coefficients of left and right circularly polarized light and has the potential for magnetically induced enantioselectivity in chemical reactions. Compared with the well-established technique with circularly polarized light, there are few reports on the production of helical conjugated polymers in a photochemical reaction based on above magnetochiral anisotropy mechanism. Herein, we demonstrate experimentally that the enantioselective polymerization of diacetylene derivative can be achieved in the liquid crystal phase by application of linearly polarized light under a parallel or antiparallel magnetic field. The screw direction of predominant helical polydiacetylene chain can be rigorously controlled with the relative orientation of linearly polarized light and the magnetic field. Moreover, the prepared helical polydiacetylene assemblies can serve as a direct visual probe for the enantioselective recognition of D-or L-lysine.

Polymeric fibres with small radii (such as ≤125 nm) are delicate to handle and should be laid down on a solid substrate to obtain practical devices. However, placing these nanofibres on commonly used glass substrates prevents them from guiding light. In this study, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate that when the nanofibre is placed on a suitable dielectric multilayer, it supports a guided mode, a Bloch surface wave (BSW) confined in one dimension. The physical origin of this new mode is discussed in comparison with the typical two-dimensional BSW mode. Polymeric nanofibres are easily fabricated to contain fluorophores, which make the dielectric nanofibre and multilayer configuration suitable for developing a large range of new nanometric scale devices, such as processor–memory interconnections, devices with sensitivity to target analytes, incident polarization and multi-colour BSW modes.

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