Researchers at Tohoku University, the University of Manchester, and Osaka University have made a breakthrough that has the potential to ignite the development of next-gen chiral information technology.

The findings are described in a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chirality is a property of materials where their mirror image is not identical to the original—just like our left and right hands. This unique characteristic creates two distinct states, which researchers believe could one day be used to store digital information, much like the “0” and “1” states in conventional computing.