{"id":204422,"date":"2025-01-24T03:48:28","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T09:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/terahertz-pulses-induce-chirality-in-a-non-chiral-crystal"},"modified":"2025-01-24T03:48:28","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T09:48:28","slug":"terahertz-pulses-induce-chirality-in-a-non-chiral-crystal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/terahertz-pulses-induce-chirality-in-a-non-chiral-crystal","title":{"rendered":"Terahertz pulses induce chirality in a non-chiral crystal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/terahertz-pulses-induce-chirality-in-a-non-chiral-crystal.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Chirality refers to objects that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images through any combination of rotations or translations, much like the distinct left and right hands of a human. In chiral crystals, the spatial arrangement of atoms confers a specific \u201chandedness,\u201d which\u2014for example\u2014influences their optical and electrical properties.<\/p>\n<p>A Hamburg-Oxford team has focused on so-called antiferro-chirals, a type of non-chiral crystal reminiscent of antiferro-magnetic materials, in which <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/magnetic+moments\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">magnetic moments<\/a> anti-align in a staggered pattern leading to a vanishing net magnetization. An antiferro-chiral crystal is composed of equivalent amounts of left-and right-handed substructures in a unit cell, rendering it overall non-chiral.<\/p>\n<p>The research team, led by Andrea Cavalleri of the Max-Planck-Institut for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, used <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/terahertz\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">terahertz<\/a> light to lift this balance in the non-chiral material boron phosphate (BPO<sub>4<\/sub>), in this way inducing finite chirality on an ultrafast time scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chirality refers to objects that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images through any combination of rotations or translations, much like the distinct left and right hands of a human. In chiral crystals, the spatial arrangement of atoms confers a specific \u201chandedness,\u201d which\u2014for example\u2014influences their optical and electrical properties. A Hamburg-Oxford team has focused on [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}