Orbital information in metals dies out almost immediately, proving that a major theory in electronics is fundamentally wrong.
Engineers believed that orbital currents could travel long distances through transition metals, much like spin currents do. New first-principles calculations show that these currents actually decay within just a few atomic layers. This means the standard interpretation of many recent experiments is based on a misunderstanding of the physics. The data that looked like long-range transport must be coming from a different, unidentified effect. This finding forces a complete rewrite of how we design the next generation of orbitronic computers.
Injection of orbital angular momentum into transition metals from first-principles
arXiv · 2605.02548
We use quantum mechanical scattering calculations implemented in a basis of tight-binding muffin-tin orbitals to calculate nonequilibrium spin and orbital currents in transition metals with a view to understanding the length scale on which they decay. In the case of spin currents, the relaxation length, called the spin-flip diffusion length, is reasonably well understood. We apply our experience with spin currents to study orbitally-polarized currents and find that they behave qualitatively diff