spin polarization

Two ink reservoirs stand on opposite sides of the cell junction. From them, two types of monomers flow onto the membrane, and when they meet, they form viscous droplets of complexes. The droplets barely move, but the free monomers dart around as fast as perfume molecules in a room.

A magnetic field usually acts like a strict traffic cop: for heat to turn into electricity, it must stand across the road. If the field lies along the heat flow, the effect disappears, or so it was believed for decades. Scientists took an ultra-thin film of a magnetic oxide — a material where electron spins are aligned in a plane, like compass needles on a table.

A highway where opposing flows are separated not just onto different sides, but onto two independent roads: each with its own entrance and exit. Something similar happens to electrons in a new type of topological insulator described by the authors of the study.

A laser beam is like a swift vortex that briefly captures a passing electron. As the particle moves through the pulse, its spin (the intrinsic rotation, like a tiny top) experiences a weak kick. After leaving the beam, the top no longer points in the same direction; it has turned a little.

When two heavy nuclei collide in an accelerator, a tiny fireball of quark-gluon plasma is born — a special state of matter where quarks and gluons are not confined inside particles. As it expands and cools, the emitted particles often come out "spinning"—their spins align along the beam direction.

On the wall: light and dark fringes. That’s what light looks like when it cancels itself out. Way back in the 17th century, Christiaan Huygens suggested that light is a wave.

A polar molecule is like a tiny dumbbell with opposite charges at its ends. Normally, such particles quickly stick together or fly apart when they meet — electric forces are too strong. But the authors of the work found a way to turn this aggressiveness into a controlled game.

Imagine a spiral staircase with balls rolling down. Some are twisted to the right, others to the left. The steps are arranged so that right-twisted balls slip through faster, while left-twisted ones get stuck. Something similar happens inside helical molecules — for example, in the double helix of DNA.

A thin sandwich made of two different materials. You run an electric current through it, and the top slice magnetizes in one direction, the bottom in the opposite. This isn't a magic trick; it's the layer Edelstein effect, just described by physicists.

A parquet floor where every other plank is turned the opposite way looks symmetric. But if you run your hand over it, in one direction your fingers glide along the grain, and in the other they catch. That's roughly how the new type of magnetism studied in the crystal AgCrP2S6 works.

In a crystal that for centuries was called 'fool's gold,' physicists have spotted genuine treasure. The compound MnTe2 with a pyrite structure has become the stage for a quantum ballet: spin waves here twist into left- and right-handed vortices, with the twist direction firmly tied to momentum.

An electron and its antiparticle — the positron, predicted by Дираком, — upon meeting, momentarily form позитроний: a tiny pair circling each other, like in an atom but without a nucleus. Almost instantly it decays, emitting two photons that turn out to be mysteriously linked.

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.

In the world of magnetism, a simple dichotomy long reigned: ferromagnets, where spins point in one direction, and antiferromagnets, where they line up in a checkerboard pattern, canceling each other out. But a recent 'third player' — altermagnets — forced a rewrite of the rules.

A spiral staircase sets the rhythm of footsteps: if a stream of people runs up it, their motion inevitably twists. Something similar happens in helical molecules — for example, in DNA or certain proteins. When an electric current is passed through such a molecule, electrons don't just fly straight.

Picture a pot of boiling soup, but every grain in it is not just a point but a tiny top spinning around its own axis. That's the world of spin-1 particles. For example, some short-lived mesons born in accelerator collisions.

Three dancers move as one: each feels all the others, and the overall harmony cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This is roughly how three particles behave, born from an electron and positron collision at the speed of light. They are a top quark, its antiparticle, and a Z boson.

Two dice lie in different rooms. If they are 'entangled,' a roll of one instantly determines the outcome of the other — even at a distance. In the quantum world, such a link is called steering: one party, by performing measurements on their side, seems to dictate the state of the partner.

Any measuring device is spoiled by quantum noise — the chaotic jitters of elementary particles. To tame it, physicists used a trick on calcium fluoride molecules, much like squeezing a balloon: press in one spot, and it bulges in another.

Run a current through a spring of organic molecules, and the electrons that come out are almost all spinning the same way. This trick is called chiral spin selectivity, and it has long puzzled physicists. In light atoms, spin (the particle's intrinsic rotation) is too weakly coupled to charge motion to achieve nearly perfect sorting.

Two teams pull a rope with equal force in opposite directions — the rope doesn't move, and the net force is zero. That's how many antiferromagnets behave: the magnetic moments of atoms are aligned oppositely and cancel each other out.

Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed so intensely that atomic nuclei fuse into long strands and flat sheets. Astrophysicists call these structures nuclear pasta. At their surface, the density of matter plummets to nearly zero, like diving out of thick jelly into thin air. It's this sharp transition that creates the unusual effect.

Two entangled photons fly apart in opposite directions but continue to behave as a single whole: measuring one instantly determines the state of the other. That's quantum entanglement. But sometimes it resembles a seasoned spy — leaving no traces detectable by ordinary checks.

The dance floor is full of couples waltzing. Usually, partners move in opposite directions: one steps forward, the other backward, to keep the overall rhythm.

The La3Ni2O7 crystal resembles a layered pie, where the filling of nickel and oxygen atoms alternates with lanthanum layers. At ambient pressure, it does not conduct without resistance, but squeeze it or grow it as a thin film, and high-temperature superconductivity emerges.

In a piece of ordinary magnet, all electron spins, tiny magnetic arrows, point in the same direction. It's a formation of soldiers facing their commander. This order is called a collinear altermagnet.

A hot spoon in a cup of tea — heat runs along the metal from the hot end to the cold one. Textbooks describe this process as atoms jiggling and passing on their jolts to each other. But atoms don't just jiggle: they also spin, like tiny tops. Until now, physicists had no common language to describe both motions at once. The authors of the work built such a language.

When particles collide at enormous speeds, they produce a shower of new particles. Among them are antiprotons — twins of ordinary protons but with the opposite charge. Each of these particles has its own spin, like a tennis ball sent with a twist. But whether antiprotons are actually spun up at birth has never been checked.

Around young stars, disks of gas and dust swirl — the building blocks for future planets. Inside these disks, dust grains don't just fly randomly: they align along invisible lines of gas flow. Recently, astronomers noticed that dust grains in such disks behave like badminton shuttlecocks — always turning their long side into the wind.

The black hole Cygnus X-1 is one of the most studied in our galaxy. It pairs with a normal star, pulling matter from it. The gas spirals into a glowing disk, like water down a drain, and above the disk hangs a scorching corona — a cloud of electrons at temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees.

An ordinary superconductor expels magnetic fields, but this ring does the opposite: it creates a magnetic field inside itself. The ring is made of Fe(Te,Se) — a compound of iron, tellurium, and selenium that loses its electrical resistance at very low temperatures.

To align particle spins in one direction, physicists usually cool a substance to near absolute zero and place it in a strong magnetic field. That is expensive and bulky. A new method resembles tuning many spinning tops with a gentle touch: mediator molecules temporarily bind to target atoms and pass on their order.

A fridge magnet sticks because the tiny atomic arrows inside it are aligned in one direction. But quantum mechanics makes these arrows jitter, so the overall magnetization falls short of the ideal.

A beam of circularly polarized light hits a MAPbI3 perovskite crystal. The electrons inside start behaving like tiny spinning tops, their axes aligning along the beam. This phenomenon is known as optical spin orientation.

A beam of light hits a metal plate with a square structure, and a pattern of tiny magnetic vortices appears on its surface, like ripples on water, but frozen and orderly. These vortices are called skyrmions, and they behave like spinning tops that can rotate in different directions.

A tuning fork rings dully when it strikes a crack. That principle scales up in this experiment: physicists turned molecules into an ultrasensitive tuning fork to eavesdrop on the electron's asymmetry.

A quantum computer is like an orchestra that has to tune its instruments before every piece. Tuning takes time and requires quiet — in our case, deep cold. For silicon chips with boron atoms, this tuning is usually done with microwaves, slowly and only at temperatures below 2 kelvin (minus 271 degrees Celsius).

An ordinary wave in a magnet is like ripples on water: the shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy. Physicists call such waves magnons. But in a thin film of bismuth yttrium iron garnet, they managed to create waves with the opposite behavior: their energy decreases as the wavelength gets shorter. These are antimagnons.

A laser beam hits a shiny crystal, and comes back different: slightly shifted in color, with a different polarization. In a magnetic field, this transformation of light becomes especially noticeable.

Two photons, like two halves of the same coin, fly tens of kilometers apart but remain linked: measure one, and you instantly know the state of the other. This property is called entanglement, and it underpins quantum communication.