It’s hard to deny that orbitronics research is gaining more and more momentum and it became one of the fast-evolving fields in condensed matter physics, thanks to interests from neighboring areas such as spintronics, magnetism, 2D materials, and electron transport. I’m quite happy about the current status, especially after many years of working on this topic alone (during my PhD). Now people recognize the importance of the orbital current.

A little issue that I am facing nowadays is that when I write or revise papers, which I submitted some time ago, what’s been written a year ago is no longer true and overly simplified. For instance, about the mechanism of the OT, I really assumed that the orbital current is simply converted to the spin current and the spin current exerts a spin-transfer torque, but a recent theoretical investigation revealed that the torque cased by the orbital current is fundamentally different from the torque caused by the spin current. The spin current contribution, which originated from the orbital current, exists, but it’s only a small portion compared to the total orbital torque.

Quite often, peer review process can take more than a year (especially for experimental works which we claimed we experimentally observed evidneces of the orbital current). In this case, when I read the paper again, I find that many things need to be rewritten, especially in the introduction where I summarize the status of the art of the field. This requires additional efforts. It sounds a bit lame, and yes I am complaining. But I am truely happy that this happens, which is away better than being stuck without much dynamics of the research field.