Compression effects in chiral osmates

Chirality in nature has long fascinated humankind, as has its application in organic chemistry. Recently though, chiral inorganics have found new recognition as a potentially rich source of complex physical responses coupling structural, thermal, electric and magnetic effects which are otherwise symmetry-forbidden. Famous examples of chiral inorganics are e.g. quartz, well known for its ability to rotate the polarisation plane of light and MnSi, hosting skyrmions.

We recently discovered the chiral osmates Ba2Os3O9 and Ba4Os6O18Cl. These are KSbO3-type materials with edge-sharing pairs of octahedra, linked together orthogonally by their corners into a 3-dimensional network. We propose to investigate the effects of chirality on the compression behaviour of the crystal structure in these materials, using the achiral compound Bi3Os3O11 as a reference.