Phys.org May 12, 2022
Recently quantum mechanical non-reciprocal transport effects that enable a highly controllable rectification were discovered. One such effect is magnetochiral anisotropy (MCA) in which the resistance of a material or a device depends on both the direction of the current flow and an applied magnetic field. However, the size of rectification possible due to MCA is usually extremely small because MCA relies on inversion symmetry breaking that leads to the manifestation of spin–orbit coupling, which is a relativistic effect. To overcome this limitation, an international team of researchers (Switzerland, Germany, Belgium) artificially broke the inversion symmetry via an applied gate voltage in thin topological insulator (TI) nanowire heterostructures and theoretically predicted that such a symmetry breaking could lead to a giant MCA effect. Their prediction was confirmed via experiments on thin bulk-insulating TI nanowires, in which they observed an MCA consistent with theory and a very large MCA rectification coefficient in a normal conductor…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
