Strong chiroptical nonlinearity in coherently stacked boron nitride nanotubes

Nanomaterials with a large chiroptical response and high structural stability are desirable for advanced miniaturized optical and optoelectronic applications. One-dimensional (1D) nanotubes are robust crystals with inherent and continuously tunable chiral geometries. However, their chiroptical response is typically weak and hard to control, due to the diverse structures of the coaxial tubes. Here we demonstrate that as-grown multiwalled boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs), featuring coherent-stacking structures including near monochirality, homo-handedness and unipolarity among the component tubes, exhibit a scalable nonlinear chiroptical response. This intrinsic architecture produces a strong nonlinear optical response in individual multiwalled BNNTs, enabling second-harmonic generation (SHG) with a conversion efficiency up to 0.01% and output power at the microwatt level—both excellent figures of merit in the 1D nanomaterials family. We further show that the rich chirality of the nanotubes introduces a controllable nonlinear geometric phase, producing a chirality-dependent SHG circular dichroism with values of −0.7 to +0.7. We envision that our 1D chiral platform will enable novel functions in compact nonlinear light sources and modulators.