Editor's Note
This editor’s note highlights the key facts and market implications behind “Chiral Phonons: The Breakthrough That Eliminates”, with emphasis on sourcing, product fit, fabrication, logistics, or buyer impact.
The heart of the discovery lies in the concept of chiral phonons, a phenomenon arising from the particular geometry of certain crystals. In materials like quartz, atoms arrange themselves in a spiral structure, similar to the threads of a screw, which exists in two non-superimposable mirror-image versions — one right-handed and one left-handed. This property, known as chirality, is the same that distinguishes the left hand from the right hand and gives the material's lattice vibrations a circular trajectory rather than a linear one. When these vibrations propagate through the crystal in the form of collective waves, the resulting phonons carry angular momentum with them.
To understand the mechanism, it is useful to imagine a crowd at a concert: when one person starts swaying in a circular motion, the movement propagates to the entire group in a coordinated way. Similarly, in a chiral material, atoms vibrate synchronously along helical trajectories, and this collective rotation transfers to the material's electrons. Researchers have demonstrated for the first time experimentally that chiral phonons are able to directly transfer orbital angular momentum to electrons in a non-magnetic material, thereby bypassing the need for specific transition metals — often classified as critical materials due to their scarcity or high cost.
Dali Sun, a physicist at North Carolina State University and co-author of the study, highlighted the practical importance of this approach: "The generation of orbital currents traditionally requires the injection of charge current into certain transition metals, many of which are now classified as critical materials. This method instead allows the use of cheaper and more abundant materials."
We don’t need a magnet, a battery, or a voltage. Just a material with chiral phonons. Before, it was unimaginable.
The statement by Valy Vardeny, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah, further clarifies the conceptual scope of the discovery.
On the experimental front, the research group worked with α-quartz, a crystal with a naturally chiral structure, applying an external magnetic field to align the chiral phonons — normally present in a disordered mixture of left-handed and right-handed states with different energies. Once sufficient alignment was achieved, the collective transfer of angular momentum to the electrons occurred spontaneously, persisting even after the removal of the external field. This flow of orbital angular momentum was termed by the authors the orbital Seebeck effect, by analogy with the well-known spin Seebeck effect that acts on electron spin.
To make an otherwise hidden phenomenon measurable, the researchers deposited thin layers of metals — tungsten and titanium — onto the surface of the α-quartz. This configuration converted the orbital angular momentum into an instrumentally detectable electrical signal. In parallel, scientists at the University of Utah performed the first direct measurement of the magnetic field generated by chiral phonons in quartz, using specialized equipment at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. The technique employed involved illuminating the material with lasers and analyzing spectral variations in the reflected light, confirming that chiral phonons produce significant magnetic effects in a material that is intrinsically non-magnetic.
The applicability of the principle is not limited to quartz. The team indicated that the approach is extendable to other chiral materials, including tellurium, selenium, and organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites, materials that are already attracting significant attention in the fields of photovoltaics and optoelectronics. Compared to conventional methods, the new mechanism requires fewer components and allows orbital angular momentum to persist for significantly longer time intervals, two fundamental characteristics for the practical feasibility of orbitronic devices.
In condensed matter physics, the search for alternatives to traditional magnetic materials for controlling electronic behavior represents one of the most urgent challenges of the digital era. The growing computational demand requires innovative solutions capable of overcoming the physical and economic limits of current components. In this context, orbitronics emerges, an emerging discipline that exploits the orbital angular momentum of electrons — that is, their motion around the atomic nucleus — as an information vector, as an alternative to the traditional approach based on electrical charge or spin. A new study published in Nature Physics, conducted by a large international consortium led by North Carolina State University, introduces a novel mechanism for generating this type of angular momentum without resorting to magnets, batteries, or electrical voltages, opening concrete scenarios for more efficient and less expensive devices.
Source: Read the original article | Published: April 21, 2026