Researchers from three universities have discovered that inducing europium atoms into a chiral magnetic spiral in a crystal structure can generate rectification in current, or a one-way street for electrons to travel, in a circuit.
This discovery could prove useful in creating more efficient circuits and faster, lower-powered data storage, as the effect can be toggled on and off with an external magnetic field.
The roots of chiral electron flow can be traced back to the early days of quantum electrodynamics, when physicists first started to understand how particles and fields interact.
The finding was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
