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CHIRAL SPINTRONICS

Chirality tweaks spins in tellurium

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 494–495 (2022)Cite this article

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Spins become polarized along their momenta when travelling through chiral tellurium nanowires. The signs of chirality and current determine the orientations of polarized spins while the spin density can be tuned by electrical gating, current and external magnetic field.

Chirality (handedness) arises from broken mirror symmetry that can be found in common objects such as screws and helical springs. Chirality often plays a crucial role in nature, for example, chemical reactions in biochemistry and weak interactions in particle physics. Of particular interest are chiral structures that interact with moving spins, thereby polarizing the spins, the orientation of which is determined by the chirality1. This fascinating phenomenon, called chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS), has been observed mostly in organic enantiomers (chiral stereoisomers), which can induce large spin polarizations. While the CISS has recently garnered vast attention across interdisciplinary communities due to potential applications, the underlying mechanism is yet to be understood. Moreover, probing CISS (especially by a two-contact measurement) is under debate as recent studies have shown that additional effects such as nonlinearity, non-unitarity and a spin relaxation/flip process are necessary to observe such a sizeable effect2. Thereby, new data from new chiral systems, including inorganic materials, with new detecting schemes are increasingly demanded, not only to capture the CISS physics better but also to develop practical devices.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of spin textures in Rashba systems and chiral systems with helical structures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research – Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA

    See-Hun Yang

  2. Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany

    See-Hun Yang

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  1. See-Hun Yang
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Correspondence to See-Hun Yang.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Yang, SH. Chirality tweaks spins in tellurium. Nat. Mater. 21, 494–495 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01228-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01228-y

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