Libor Šmejkal

Electrons in a CrSb crystal behave like a school of fish: inside the material, they dart along their "corridors," and at the boundary with vacuum, they arrange themselves into intricate patterns. These patterns are the Fermi surface — a map of all allowed electron velocities. You can't reach out and touch it, but you can "feel" it with a magnetic field.

Traditional electronics operates on charge, but spintronics and the nascent orbitronics dream of incorporating the particles' own rotation. At the heart of this lies the Edelstein effect: a current flowing in materials with Rashba spin-orbit coupling generates spin polarization.