Just as people can be left-handed or right-handed, scientists have observed chirality or "handedness” in swirling electric vortices in a layered material. (Credit: Pixabay)
Scientists at Berkeley Lab study exotic material's properties, which could make possible a new form of data storage. Scientists used spiraling X-rays at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to observe, for the first time, a property that gives handedness to swirling electric patterns - dubbed polar vortices - in a synthetically layered material. This property, also known as chirality, potentially opens up a new way to store data by controlling the leftor right-handedness in the material's array in much the same way magnetic materials are manipulated to store data as ones or zeros in a computer's memory. Researchers said the behavior also could be explored for coupling to magnetic or optical (light-based) devices, which could allow better control via electrical switching. Chirality is present in many forms and at many scales, from the spiral-staircase design of our own DNA to the spin and drift of spiral galaxies; it can even determine whether a molecule acts as a medicine or a poison in our bodies. A molecular compound known as d-glucose, for example, which is an essential ingredient for human life as a form of sugar, exhibits right-handedness. Its left-handed counterpart, l-glucose, though, is not useful in human biology.
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