A material built to tell left-handed light from right-handed light has long had a frustrating weakness. It mostly ignored visible light. That limitation may now be easing. A University at Buffalo-led team reports that it paired a chiral semiconductor with a non-chiral molecule that absorbs visible light more readily, producing a hybrid system that not only responds to visible wavelengths but also keeps the optical handedness that makes chiral materials unusual in the first place. The work, published in Nature Communications, centers on chiral perovskites, a class of semiconductors whose structures come in left- and right-handed forms. Those materials can respond differently to left- and right-circularly polarized light, making them attractive for polarized-light detection, optical communication systems and other optoelectronic uses. The problem is that many chiral semiconductors work best under higher-energy ultraviolet light, not the visible wavelengths used in many practical devices. “We were able to transfer the properties of chirality to a non-chiral molecule,” said Wanyi Nie, associate professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Physics and the study’s corresponding author. “The …