Chiral Electronics with Chiral Crystals

The rise of artificial intelligence is driving an unprecedented demand for computing power, fueling a race to find new materials that allow chips to keep shrinking while becoming faster and more energy-efficient. A major bottleneck is no longer the transistor itself, but the copper interconnects: the nanoscale wires that connect billions of transistors. As these wires become thinner, their resistance rises sharply because electrons scatter more strongly from surfaces and grain boundaries. Chiral crystals offer an intriguing alternative. Their atoms are arranged in a left- or right-handed pattern, like a spiral staircase, and some host chiral surface states predicted to be protected against surface scattering. The long-term vision is to make chiral interconnects that conduct with far lower resistance than copper. Yet the fundamental physics and materials science behind such interconnects remain poorly understood.

In this inaugural lecture, I will review what we have learned about chiral topological semimetals in the seven years since my group, along with groups in the US, China and Japan, discovered their unusual surface states. I will explain how their surface electronic structure is connected to the chirality and topology of the bulk, and to the handedness of the crystal lattice. I will also show that the spin and orbital angular momentum of electrons in these materials are locked to crystal momentum in a chiral way not seen in other materials, potentially opening new routes for magnetic memory.

I will then outline three open questions to be answered in the years to come: What are the fundamental limits of electron transport in chiral nanowires? Can electronic chirality be measured as a number? And can we design new chiral materials on purpose? To pursue these questions, we are building a new instrument in Halle that brings synchrotron-class light-source performance into the laboratory, enabling unprecedented characterization of chiral materials. Combined with new synthesis approaches, our goal is to turn chirality from a beautiful property of nature into a design principle for future chiral electronics.