Japanese Team Discovers New Ordered State of "Electronic Chirality" in Uranium Compound
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Tohoku University announced on July 28 that their research team has discovered a new electronic ordered state in the uranium compound URhSn, confirming for the first time in an actual material that even when the crystal structure itself lacks chirality, the arrangement of electrons within the material can spontaneously form right-handed/left-handed characteristics. Chirality generally refers to the property where an object cannot perfectly coincide with its mirror image, such as left and right hands, screw thread directions, and the helical structure of DNA. In the past, material chirality was generally believed to originate from asymmetry in atomic arrangement. This study demonstrates, however, that chirality can also arise from the ordered arrangement of electron distributions. The research team used single-crystal samples of URhSn, composed of uranium, rhodium, and tin, and employed nuclear magnetic...
2026-08-03
