Jagoda Sławińska
Chiral molecules and crystals, similarly to human hands, have distinguishable right-handed and left-handed enantiomers which may manifest dissimilar physical and chemical properties and behave differently in response to external stimuli. In this talk, I will discuss the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) that allows the conversion of charge current to collinear spin current and vice versa in chiral crystals. Based on the first-principles calculations, the CISS effect in solids has been classified as an analog of the Rashba-Edelstein effect, occurring for systems with Weyl-type spin-orbit coupling and a radial spin texture around specific high-symmetry points in the reciprocal space. Importantly, the induced spin accumulation is intrinsically protected by the quasi-persistent spin helix arising as a consequence of crystal symmetries in Weyl systems; the spin transport can be therefore protected over large (even micrometer-scale) distances, as recently observed in elemental tellurium and chiral disilicides. Long-range spin accumulation in chiral crystals opens novel routes for the design of solid-state electronic devices; its orbitronics analog represents another extremely interesting perspective that remains to be explored.