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  • Letter

Engineering chiral-induced spin selectivity in an artificial topological quantum well

Lizhou Liu1, Peng-Yi Liu1, Tian-Yi Zhang1, and Qing-Feng Sun1,2,*

  • 1International Center for Quantum Materials, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2Hefei National Laboratory, Hefei 230088, China

  • *Contact author: sunqf@pku.edu.cn

Phys. Rev. B 113, L121407 – Published 18 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/87b7-rq7h

Abstract

Chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) is a striking phenomenon in which spin-unpolarized electrons become spin polarized after traversing a chiral medium. Theoretical studies have shown that spin-orbit coupling, geometric chirality, and dephasing act cooperatively for this effect to emerge. Inspired by this, we demonstrate a solid-state realization of CISS in an engineered InAs/GaSb quantum well where geometric chirality and dephasing can be introduced controllably. Introducing a chiral structure produces a clear spin polarization whose sign reverses when the chirality is flipped and whose magnitude grows systematically with the number of dephasing electrodes, while achiral configurations exhibit no spin selectivity. The polarization remains robust even under strong Anderson disorder, showing that the engineered chiral structures provide an intrinsically stable route to spin-selective transport. These results establish a solid-state platform in the topological quantum well system for controllably generating the CISS effect.

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