Burkhardt Ulrich, Borrmann Horst, Moll Philip, Schmidt Marcus, Grin Yuri, Winkelmann Aimo
Max-Planck-Institut für Chemische Physik fester Stoffe, Dresden, Germany.
École polytechnique fédéral de Lausanne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2020 Mar 4;10(1):4065. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-59854-y.
The absence of centrosymmetry in chiral and polar crystal structures is the reason for many technical relevant physical properties like optical birefringence or ferroelectricity. Other chirality related properties that are actually intensively investigated are unconventional superconductivity or unusual magnetic ordering like skyrmions in materials with B20 structure. Despite the often close crystal structure - property relation, its detection is often challenging due to superposition of domains with different absolute structure e.g. chirality. Our investigations of high quality CoSi crystals with B20 structure by both complementary methods X- ray (volume sensitive) and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) (surface sensitive) results the consistent assignment of the chirality and reveal fundamental differences in their sensitivity to chirality. The analysis of the surface of a CoSi crystal with domains of different chirality show the high spatial resolution of this method which opens the possibility to analyze the chirality in microstructures of technical relevant materials like thin films and catalysts.
手性和极性晶体结构中缺乏中心对称性是许多与技术相关的物理性质的原因，如光学双折射或铁电性。其他与手性相关的性质，实际上正在深入研究的是非常规超导性或不寻常的磁有序，如具有B20结构的材料中的斯格明子。尽管晶体结构与性质之间的关系通常很紧密，但由于具有不同绝对结构（如手性）的畴的叠加，其检测往往具有挑战性。我们通过互补方法X射线（体敏感）和电子背散射衍射（EBSD）（表面敏感）对具有B20结构的高质量CoSi晶体进行的研究，结果对手性进行了一致的归属，并揭示了它们对手性敏感性的根本差异。对具有不同手性畴的CoSi晶体表面的分析表明了该方法的高空间分辨率，这为分析薄膜和催化剂等技术相关材料微观结构中的手性开辟了可能性。
