In the natural world, many things come in mirror-image pairs. Your left and right hands are a perfect example—they look alike but can’t be perfectly superimposed. This idea, called chirality or “handedness,” is found everywhere in science, from the spiral of DNA to the twist of snail shells. For a long time, scientists believed certain materials didn’t have this handedness. But a groundbreaking discovery has changed that thinking.
A team of researchers at Princeton University, led by physics professor M. Zahid Hasan, has found a hidden chiral quantum state in a material long considered non-chiral. Their research, published in Nature Communications, uncovered new behavior in a special type of material called a Kagome lattice. This result changes what scientists thought they knew about how certain materials behave on a quantum level.
