Prof. Gyung-Min Choi’s team (co-1st author: Young-Gwan Choi, co-1st author: Kyung-Hun Ko) at Sungkyunkwan University and Prof. Hyun-Woo Lee’s team (co-1st author: Daegeun Jo) at Postech found that electron has a curved trajectory by the orbital Hall effect.

Like a pitcher control a trajectory of a curved ball, scientists want to control a trajectory of electrons inside electronic devices. Prof. Choi’s research team found that the trajectory of electrons can be controlled by the orbital angular momentum.

Prof. Choi said that this research demonstrate that angular momentum of electrons can be controlled. And this mechanism can be applied for a low power operation of magnetic memory.

This work was supported by the junior researcher support program, and it was published on the Nature at July 6th.

Title: Observation of the orbital Hall effect in a light metal T