Chirality-Induced Electrical Generation of Magnetism in Nonmagnetic Elemental Tellurium

TL;DR

This study provides experimental evidence that nonmagnetic chiral tellurium crystals can generate magnetization when an electric current is applied, revealing a novel coupling between electricity and magnetism in chiral inorganic materials.

Contribution

It demonstrates the first direct measurement of current-induced magnetization in nonmagnetic chiral tellurium, linking crystal chirality to spin polarization effects.

Findings

Electric current induces measurable NMR shifts in tellurium crystals.

Reversing crystal chirality reverses the NMR shift.

The effect is explained by linear current-induced magnetization, not higher-order effects.

Abstract

Chiral matter has a structure that lacks inversion, mirror, and rotoreflection symmetry; thus, a given chiral material has either a right- or left-handed structure. In chiral matter, electricity and magnetism can be coupled in an exotic manner beyond the classical electromagnetism (e.g., magneto chiral effect in chiral magnets). In this paper, we give a firm experimental proof of the linear electric-current-induced magnetization effect in bulk nonmagnetic chiral matter elemental trigonal tellurium. We measured a $^{125} $Te nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectral shift under a pulsed electric current for trigonal tellurium single crystals. We provide general symmetry considerations to discuss the electrically (electric-field- and electric-current-) induced magnetization and clarify that the NMR shift observed in trigonal tellurium is caused by the linear current-induced magnetization effect, not by a higher-order magnetoelectric effect. We also show that the current-induced NMR shift is reversed by a chirality reversal of the tellurium crystal structure. This result is the first direct evidence of crystal-chirality-induced spin polarization, which is an inorganic-bulk-crystal analogue of the chirality-induced spin selectivity in chiral organic molecules. The present findings also show that nonmagnetic chiral crystals may be applied to spintronics and coil-free devices to generate magnetization beyond the classical electromagnetism.