Cracking the Quantum Mirror: Hidden Chirality Found in a Symmetrical Crystal

A Princeton team uncovered a surprising chiral quantum state in a supposedly non-chiral material, shedding light on elusive symmetry-breaking effects and opening doors to new quantum technologies.

Chirality, the property of being different from one’s mirror image, has fascinated scientists in fields ranging from biology and chemistry to physics. Often referred to as “handedness,” chirality describes objects that come in distinct left- or right-handed forms. It’s a fundamental feature of nature, appearing across many scales: in molecules and amino acids, in the iconic double-helix structure of DNA, and even in the spiral shapes of snail shells.

Now, researchers at Princeton University have discovered a hidden chiral quantum state in a material once believed to be non-chiral. This breakthrough sheds light on a long-standing debate in the physics community and pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in quantum science.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, a team led by M. Zahid Hasan, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton, used an advanced scanning photocurrent microscope (SPCM) to detect broken symmetries within a charge density wave in KV₃Sb₅, a topological material with a Kagome lattice structure. Their findings help resolve a major controversy: whether these types of materials can spontaneously break symmetry to form chiral quantum states — a key question with implications for the development of future quantum technologies.

While similar symmetry breaking has been observed in non-topological systems, this marks the first time it has been detected in a bulk topological quantum material, making the discovery especially significant.

A Quantum Telescope for the Invisible

“This is somewhat like pointing the James Webb telescope at the quantum world and discovering something new,” said Hasan. “We’re finally able to resolve subtle quantum effects that had remained hidden in a topological quantum material.”

The Kagome lattice is a two-dimensional geometrical pattern composed of corner-sharing triangles. It is named after a traditional woven bamboo basket pattern that is a common design in Japan and has long been a central platform for exploring exotic quantum phases. For a long time, it was considered inherently achiral, meaning that it lacks handedness. Yet, in 2021, Hasan’s group used a high-resolution scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and discovered that, under certain conditions, KV₃Sb₅ spontaneously forms an unusual charge density wave — a periodic modulation of electronic density. This discovery, which resulted in a highly-cited paper in Nature, raised tantalizing questions about whether chirality in the form of a charge order could emerge atop a non-chiral Kagome lattice. The paper is among the three most cited papers in the field because of the issues it has raised.

A spontaneous charge order in physics is a type of phase transition (like water turning to ice) that occurs when electric charges form non-random patterns. In essence, an ordered state is created from an initially disordered state through a process known as spontaneous symmetry breaking.

However, detecting the specific symmetries broken during this transition have proved notoriously difficult in certain classes of topological materials. Subtle differences between left- and right-handed quantum states in such quantum materials have long eluded conventional measurement techniques.

Revealing Chirality With Light

To tackle this, graduate student Zi-Jia Cheng and postdoctoral researcher Shafayat Hossain, two co-lead authors of the paper, engineered a scanning photocurrent microscope capable of detecting this topological material’s nonlinear electromagnetic response under circularly polarized light. This microscope is different from a scanning tunneling microscope, which has typically been used in these types of experiments. The SPCM, though not as high resolution as the STM, is used when the goal is to characterize optically active materials and study their photocurrent behavior at a local scale. A combination of STM and SPCM then provides the complete imaging of the many-body quantum wavefunction.

“In this set up, we shine and focus coherent light on the sample placed in a specially designed quantum device and as the light interacts with the sample it generates a photocurrent that we can measure,” said Hasan.

Together with former postdoctoral fellow Qi Zhang, the researchers fabricated ultra-clean quantum crystal devices and cooled them down to a frigid 4 degrees Kelvin for the measurement.

At high temperatures, the photocurrent showed no preference between right- and left-handed circular light. But as the material was cooled past its charge density wave transition, a remarkable shift occurred: the photocurrent became handed, a definitive signature of chirality known as the circular photogalvanic effect.

Measuring Broken Symmetry

The researchers achieved this by first shining right-circularly coherent polarized (right-handed) light on the lattice and then measured its current. Then they shined left-handed light and measured its current. They were able to see a very clear difference between the two.

“Our measurements directly pinpoint broken inversion and mirror symmetries and shed light on the topological nature of this quantum material that exhibits charge order,” said Cheng. “This conclusively establishes the intrinsic chiral nature of the charge-ordered state in a topological material for the first time.”

Despite this, an explanation for this phenomenon remains elusive. “We confirmed the phenomenon, but we don’t yet have a rigorous theory as to why it occurs,” added Hasan. “We still don’t fully understand it.”

However, the implications stretch beyond basic science. According to Hasan, chiral quantum states could one day power new optoelectronic and photovoltaic technologies. “It’s surprising that an emergent chiral state can generate such a pronounced response that was never reported before,” he said. “This work also shows that second-order electromagnetic measurements are a powerful tool for detecting subtle symmetry breakings in topological materials.”

Why Symmetry Breaking Matters

Symmetry breaking is important because it explains the emergence of ordered states in nature and understanding how the process works is a fundamental goal of scientific investigation. Symmetric theories in physics are frameworks in which the laws governing the universe remain constant under specific conditions. These theories are essential for understanding the universe and, indeed, are fundamental to the advancement of scientific inquiry. However, much of the real world is, in fact, asymmetrical in nature. Therefore, understanding how and under what conditions symmetries are broken is crucial to understanding many concepts in physics, such as phase transitions, magnetism and superconductivity, and topological behaviors, to name a few.

As for the future? Hasan is optimistic: “This is just the beginning. With these sensitive tools, who knows what hidden worlds of topological quantum matter we’ll uncover next.”

Legacy and Quantum Frontiers

This research’s roots lie in the workings of the quantum Hall effect — a form of topological effect that was the subject of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985. Since that time, topological phases have been studied and many new classes of quantum materials with topological electronic structures have been found. Most notably, Daniel Tsui, the Arthur Legrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, at Princeton, won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the fractional quantum Hall effect. Similarly, F. Duncan Haldane, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton, won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and a type of two-dimensional topological insulator. Subsequent theoretical developments showed that topological insulators can take the form of two copies of Haldane’s model based on electron’s spin-orbit interaction.

Hasan and his research team have been following in the footsteps of these researchers by investigating new aspects of topological quantum materials and searching for novel states of quantum matter. This led them, in 2007, to the discovery of the first examples of three-dimensional topological insulator state. Since then, Hasan and his team have been on a decade-long search for novel quantum properties in topological materials that combine symmetry and topology. The latest discovery shows that certain classes of topological materials can host quantum many-body states that break important symmetries and exhibit spontaneously developed definite chirality at low temperatures.

Reference: “Broken symmetries associated with a Kagome chiral charge order” by Zi-Jia Cheng, Md Shafayat Hossain, Qi Zhang, Sen Shao, Jinjin Liu, Yilin Zhao, Mohammad Yahyavi, Yu-Xiao Jiang, Jia-Xin Yin, Xian Yang, Yongkai Li, Tyler A. Cochran, Maksim Litskevich, Byunghoon Kim, Junyi Zhang, Yugui Yao, Luis Balicas, Zhiwei Wang, Guoqing Chang and M. Zahid Hasan, 22 April 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58262-y

The research at Princeton was partially funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center (at ORNL) and Princeton University; STM Instrumentation support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF9461) and the theory work; and support from the US DOE under the Basic Energy Sciences program (grant number DOE/BES DE-FG-02-05ER46200) for the theory and sample characterization work including ARPES. Additional support for the SPCM technique and instrumentation development came from the US DOE under the Basic Energy Sciences program (grant number DOE/BES DE-FG-02-05ER46200) for the sample characterization based on advanced spectroscopy work. See the paper for a complete list of support.

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