Structural Chirality and Electronic Chirality in Quantum Materials

Abstract

In chemistry and biochemistry, chirality represents the structural asymmetry characterized by non-superimposable mirror images for a material like DNA. In physics, however, chirality commonly refers to the spin-momentum locking of a particle or quasiparticle in the momentum space. While seemingly disconnected, structural chirality in molecules and crystals can drive electronic chirality through orbital-momentum locking, i.e. chirality can be transferred from the atomic geometry to electronic orbitals. Electronic chirality provides an insightful understanding of the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS), in which electrons exhibit salient spin polarization after going through a chiral material, and electric magnetochiral anisotropy (EMCA), which is characterized by the diode-like transport. It further gives rise to new phenomena, such as anomalous circularly polarized light emission (ACPLE), in which the light handedness relies on the emission direction. These chirality-driven effects will generate broad impacts in fundamental science and technology applications in spintronics, optoelectronics, and biochemistry.

Invited review for Annual Review on Materials Research

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Superconducting Diode Effects: Mechanisms, Materials and Applications
• Ultrafast Chirality-dependent Dynamics from Helicity-resolved Transient Absorption Spectroscopy
• Intrinsic Orbital Origin for the Chirality-Dependent Nonlinear Planar Hall Effect of Topological Nodal Fermions in Chiral Crystals
• Electrical magnetochiral anisotropy and quantum metric in chiral conductors
• Chiral Topological Phononic Quasiparticles in Enantiomeric Crystals SrSi${}_2$ and BaSi${}_2$
• Linear and Nonlinear Edelstein Effects in Chiral Topological Semimetals
• Giant and Broadband Circular Dichroism from Particle-Hole Symmetry Breaking in Weyl Semimetals
• Chiral symmetry and magnetism in a 3D Kagome lattice: RPt${}_2$B (R = La and Nd) prototype crystals