In 2018, a discovery in materials science sent shock waves throughout the community. A team showed that stacking two layers of graphene—a honeycomb-like layer of carbon extracted from graphite—at a precise "magic angle" turned it into a superconductor, says Ritesh Agarwal of the University of Pennsylvania.
This sparked the field of "twistronics," revealing that twisting layered materials could unlock extraordinary material properties.
Building on this concept, Agarwal, Penn theoretical physicist Eugene Mele, and collaborators have taken twistronics into new territory.
In a study published in Nature, they investigated spirally stacked tungsten disulfide (WS2) crystals and discovered that, by twisting these layers, light could be used to manipulate electrons. The result is analogous to the Coriolis force, which curves the paths of objects in a rotating frame, like how wind and ocean currents behave on Earth.
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