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Hong Kong University of Science and Technology team achieves 300x spin lifetime boost in perovskites

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November 9, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Researchers led by Professor LU Haipeng of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Department of Chemistry have developed a perovskite chiral multiple quantum-well system that achieves spin polarization lasting approximately 300 times longer at room temperature. This new architecture enables an efficient “spin cascade” process, mitigating energy-related issues that typically limit spin lifetime. The team published their findings in Nature Photonics, detailing how this system overcomes the conventional need for ultralow temperatures to maintain long-lived spin polarization. The study opens new possibilities for future quantum technologies and spin-based applications.

Perovskite Chiral Multiple Quantum Wells Extend Spin Lifetime

This improvement stems from a novel architecture using chiral multiple quantum wells, a departure from conventional single quantum-well designs. Unlike single wells, these multiple systems facilitate a continuous transfer of spin information through intermediate, polarized states, a process the researchers term a cascade. This cascade mitigates energy-related Rashba splitting at interfaces, a phenomenon that typically causes rapid spin decoherence and limits the practical application of spin-based technologies.

Constructing these wells required a two-step seed-assisted crystallization approach, allowing the team to create well-oriented quantum wells with varying widths and intrinsic chirality across different perovskite phases. The resulting structurally coupled quantum wells establish an energy gradient and a fully chiral environment, generating the series of intermediate spin-polarized states critical to the extended spin lifetime.

Materials built with this method also demonstrate spin-dependent charge transport exceeding 80% polarization, and circularly polarized luminescence with a luminescence dissymmetry factor of up to 1.4 × 10 -2. These properties enabled the development of proof-of-concept applications, including efficient X-ray-triggered dissymmetric photopolymerization and high-performance circularly polarized light detection, suggesting potential for asymmetric photocatalysis and advanced optical sensing.

The implications of this work extend beyond fundamental materials science. The team’s findings offer a promising platform for spin accumulation and the development of advanced chiroptical and spintronic devices. “Our study demonstrates that introducing intrinsic chirality across successive quantum-well phases, together with a graded energy landscape, enables efficient spin transfer and prolonged spin polarization in perovskite semiconductors,” said Professor LU Haipeng at HKUST.

Our study demonstrates that introducing intrinsic chirality across successive quantum-well phases, together with a graded energy landscape, enables efficient spin transfer and prolonged spin polarization in perovskite semiconductors.

Prof. LU Haipeng, Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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