Magnetic Chirality

Sang-Wook Cheong, Rutgers University

The term of “chiral” has been extensively, in fact, almost abusively, used in Physics community in recent years. Chirality refers the situation where an object and its mirror image cannot overlap to each other by spatial rotation. In addition, chirality should not change under time reversal. Magnetic chirality means chirality in spin ordered states or spin textures. Chirality prime (chirality′) means that all of mirror and time reversal symmetries are broken even if spatial rotation is freely allowed. We can have magnetic chirality or chirality′ in three different situations: [1] in centrosymmetric magnetic lattices while their crystallographic lattices are chiral, [2] in chiral magnetic lattices while their crystallographic lattices are also chiral, and [3] in centrosymmetric crystallographic lattices. We will discuss a number of examples of magnetic chirality and chirality′, and also their emergent physical phenomena.

Please sign up here in order to get the Zoom link and regular announcements of the upcoming talks.