In 1953, two physicists showed that an electron beam skimming past a grating emits light whose color depends only on the electron\u2019s speed and the grating\u2019s spacing. Known as Smith-Purcell radiation, this phenomenon has become a useful tool for building compact, tunable light sources and tracking particle beams without touching them.<\/p>\n
Now, researchers from Singapore and China have discovered that this well-studied effect has been hiding a property nobody thought to look for: chirality, or \u201chandedness.\u201d In their paper \u201cObservation of inherent chiral Smith-Purcell effect via symmetry breaking,\u201d published<\/a> in Nature Communications<\/i>, associate professors Wu Lin and Dong Zhaogang from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) showed that the radiation is inherently chiral and demonstrated two simple ways to bring that chirality out with a plain silicon grating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1953, two physicists showed that an electron beam skimming past a grating emits light whose color depends only on the electron\u2019s speed and the grating\u2019s spacing. Known as Smith-Purcell radiation, this phenomenon has become a useful tool for building compact, tunable light sources and tracking particle beams without touching them. Now, researchers from Singapore [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245900","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=245900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}