Giant chirality-induced spin polarization in twisted transition metal dichalcogenides

Abstract: Chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) is an effect that has recently attracted a great deal of attention in chiral chemistry and that remains to be understood. In the CISS effect, electrons passing through chiral molecules acquire a large degree of spin polarization. In this work we study the case of atomically-thin chiral crystals created by van der Waals assembly. We show that this effect can be spectacularly large in systems containing just two monolayers, provided they are spin-orbit coupled. Its origin stems from the combined effects of structural chirality and spin-flipping spin-orbit coupling. We present detailed calculations for twisted homobilayer transition metal dichalcogenides, showing that the chirality-induced spin polarization can be giant, e.g. easily exceeding $50\%$ for ${\rm MoTe}_2$. Our results clearly indicate that twisted quantum materials can operate as a fully tunable platform for the study and control of the CISS effect in condensed matter physics and chiral chemistry.