Seeing Orbital Currents with Light

After the long peer review, our paper on the magneto-optical detection of orbital Hall effect is finally published in the last month:

• Young-Gwan Choi, Daegeun Jo, Kyung-Hun Ko, Dongwook Go, Kyung-Han Kim, Hee Gyum Park, Changyoung Kim, Byoung-Chul Min, Gyung-Min Choi, Hyun-Woo Lee
  Observation of the orbital Hall effect in a light metal Ti
  Nature 619, 52 (2023)

I think this is one of the most convincing evidence of the existence of orbital currents. Seeing is believing. We were able to “see” orbital accumulation by the scattering of polarized light.

In the last week, I had an opportunity to invite Young-Gwan Choi, the leading author of this work, to Jülich. He visited the Peter Grünberg Institute in the Jülich Research Centre and gave a seminar on the above paper as well as on his previous and ongoing/future works. Certainly the talk was very good and inspiring, not only to me but probably to many people in the institute. I found quite interesting to see how he thinks about certain problems and has unique perspectives and approaches on them, which are quite different from theoreticians, for sure, and also distinct from other experimentalists. It was overall great chance for me to discuss recent research works and catch up life-stuffs.