Expanding Chirality: Introducing a Novel Material Class.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have experimentally realized higher-rank chirality, a theoretical extension of the concept of chirality that accounts for more intricate chiral flows in two dimensions. They constructed a topological circuit network to explore the entirely new behaviors predicted by this extended chirality, which manifests as locking between a particle's flow direction and the direction of an arrow that it carries along with it. This new class of materials could be used to filter flows and engineer optical beams, and could lead to transformative new applications in microelectronics.