Novel Chiral Materials for Optoelectronic and Spintronic applications.

Mapping properties to symmetry principles is an ongoing and crosscutting challenge in science. Whereas structural chirality has a well known vital role in chemical and biological processes, the recent discoveries of remarkable physical properties like robust spin dependent transport due to Fermi arcs that span the Brillouin zone and significant optical activity have brought structural chirality to the forefront of materials design. Therefore, expanding the pool of chiral crystals provides ample opportunity to stimulate advances in quantum information systems and spintronics. By making chemical substitutions in the known chiral crystal LiNbZnO₄, which forms an enantiomer pair in space groups 91 and 95, we have generated a family of novel spinel compounds comprised of edge connected helical sub-lattices. Here, we report the first principles characterization of the elastically and vibrationally stable unreported compounds, MgMnZnO₄, MgRuZnO₄ and SrMnZnO₄, that host interesting giant gyrotropic dielectric response and momentum dependent spin splitting.