A team of physicists at The City College of New York, led by Lia Krusin-Elbaum, has developed an innovative technique using hydrogen cations (H⁺) to control the electronic properties of a magnetic Weyl semimetal. This type of material, known as a topological material, allows electrons to behave like massless particles called Weyl fermions. These unique particles exhibit a property known as chirality, or “handedness,” which links their spin and momentum.
The researchers focused on the magnetic material MnSb2Te4, where they discovered that introducing hydrogen ions can effectively “tune” and enhance the chirality of electron transport. This process reshapes the material’s energy features, known as Weyl nodes, in a controllable way. Their discovery could pave the way for new quantum devices that leverage topological states, with potential applications in advanced chiral nano-spintronics and fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Their findings, published in Nature Communications under the title “Transport chirality generated by a tunable tilt of Weyl nodes in a van der Waals topological magnet,” demonstrate the potential of this technique to expand the possibilities of quantum technology.
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