Topology, Spin and Orbital in DNA-like Chiral Quantum Materials
 

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 quasi particle in the momentum space. While seemingly unrelated characters indifferent fields, the structural chirality leads to the electronic chirality featured by the orbital-momentum locking encoded in the wavefunction of chiral molecules or solids, i.e. the chirality information transfers from the atomic geometry to the electronic orbital. The electronic chirality provides deep insights into the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS), in which electrons exhibit salient spin polarization after going through a chiral material. It also 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

Binghai Yan is an associate professor in the department ofcondensed matter physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He is a theoretical physicist and currently interested in topological materials andtopology-induced phenomena in transport and optics.  After completing his PhD at Tsinghua University in 2008, he worked as a postdoc at Bremen University and later at Stanford University. He was a group leader in the Max Planck Institute in Dresden during 2012-2016 and started his current position at Weizmann Institutein 2017. He was awarded the ARCHES Prize in Germany in 2013, the Israel Physical Society Prize for Young Scientist in 2017 and recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher every year since 2019. He is currently visiting in Penn State University for sabbatical.